Neurobot » Postdoctoral research associate in Neuroscience

3
Jan
Postdoctoral research associate in Neuroscience

Bioengineering group – Department of Engineering – University of Leicester
A 3-year post-doc position is available to candidates with a PhD in areas related to Neuroscience or Signal Processing (physics, mathematics, engineering, computer sciences). The starting date is March 2008.

The focus of the project is to study single neuron correlates of conscious visual perception and behaviour in the human brain. The data comes from patients suffering from epilepsy who do not improve with medication and are implanted with intracranial electrodes to evaluate the potential outcome of curative surgery. Besides its clinical importance, this procedure allows the fascinating opportunity to study the activity of multiple single neurons in awake and behaving human subjects, who can report and give details of their perception and behaviour in different tasks and brain states.
The project will be carried out with Dr. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga at the Dept. of Engineering, University of Leicester (www.le.ac.uk/neuroengineering) in collaboration with the Institute of Epileptology at Kings College London. It will follow up on recent findings about the encoding of visual information by single cells in the human brain
(see http://www.vis.caltech.edu/~rodri/papers/nature03687.pdf and http://www.le.ac.uk/users/egweb2/Documents/Press_releases.mht for a selection of press releases).
The successful candidate will perform experiments at the Epilepsy Centre of KCL, which is the first centre to perform these recordings in the UK and one of the firsts in Europe. Another research focus will be the development and further optimization of advanced methods for the analysis of large dataset of single-cell recordings. This is not only important for the human recordings, but also for the analysis of multiple single-neurons in animals.
Applicants are expected to have a strong background in Mathematics (mainly Signal Processing) and Neuroscience. Experience with neurophysiology recordings is desirable but not essential. The position requires very good knowledge of programming, especially in Matlab.
For further details and informal discussion contact Dr. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga (rqqg1@le.ac.uk) and see www.le.ac.uk/neuroengineering.