Post-doctoral position at Boston University, Center for Memory and Brain

A full-time postdoctoral position is available in the Center for Memory and Brain, Department of Psychology and Program in Neuroscience at Boston University.

The post-doctoral fellow will develop compartmental biophysical simulations of entorhinal, subicular and hippocampal neurons and circuits involved in encoding and retrieval of sequences for memory guided behavior. The post-doctoral fellow will join a large community of researchers in the Center for Memory and Brain.
Research will focus initially on developing compartmental biophysical simulations of grid cell responses in entorhinal cortex, based on cellular mechanisms such as membrane potential oscillations and persistent spiking (Giocomo et al., 2007; Hasselmo, 2008a). Simulations will use standard packages such as MATLAB, Neuron and GENESIS.
Modeling will include interaction with experimental work using whole-cell patch recording in slice preparations of entorhinal cortex and subiculum (Giocomo and Hasselmo, 2008; Yoshida et al., 2008) and experimental work on unit recording data in awake, behaving rats (Lee et al., 2006; Hasselmo, 2008b). Collaborations will include Dr. Erik Fransen at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, and Prof. Howard Eichenbaum and Prof. Chantal Stern in the Center for Memory and Brain at Boston University. Simulations will use standard packages such as MATLAB, Neuron or GENESIS.
Candidates should have previous experience with developing compartmental biophysical simulations of neurons. E-mail your CV and the e-mail addresses of two references to Prof. Michael Hasselmo, hasselmo@bu.edu. Boston University is an Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity Employer.
Citations: (Also available at http://www.bu.edu/hasselmo/publications.html)
Giocomo LM, Zilli EA, Fransen E, Hasselmo ME. (2007) Temporal frequency of subthreshold oscillations scales with entorhinal grid cell field spacing. Science, 315(5819):1719-22.
Giocomo, L.M., Hasselmo, M.E. (2008) Time constant of I(h) differs along dorsal to ventral axis of medial entorhinal cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 28:9414-25.
Hasselmo, M.E. (2008a) Grid cell mechanisms and function: Contributions of entorhinal persistent spiking and phase resetting. Hippocampus 18: 1213-29.
Hasselmo, M.E. (2008b) Temporally structured replay of neural activity in a model of entorhinal cortex, hippocampus and postsubiculum. Eur. J. Neurosci. 28:1301-1315.
Lee I., Griffin A., Zilli E., Eichenbaum H., Hasselmo M.E. (2006) Gradual translocation of spatial correlates of neuronal firing in the hippocampus toward prospective reward locations. Neuron 51:639-50.
Yoshida, M., Fransen, E., Hasselmo, M.E. (2008) mGluR-dependent persistent firing in entorhinal cortex layer III neurons. Eur. J. Neurosci. 28:1116-26.