Job ID: 99508

PhD on circuit mechanisms of priors and learning

Position: Ph.D. Student

Deadline: 20 January 2023

City: Barcelona

Country: Spain

Institution: IDIBAPS

Department:

Description:

The Brain Circuits and Behavior lab at IDIBAPS (Barcelona; www.braincircuitsbehavior.org) has opened 1 PhD position. 

The project is part of the NIH-AEI Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS) program, that will be carried out in our lab in collaboration with Robert G. Yang (MIT) and Manuel Molano (CRM).

The PhD candidate should have a masters in Neuroscience (or similar), experience working with mice or rats, fluent English, ability to work in an interdisciplinary team, be responsible and oriented to the detail. We will value programming skills, experience with stereotactic surgeries and writing/communication skills. 

The project consists in studying how rats and humans learn simple categorization tasks with different statistical structure (i.e. different serial correlations in the stimulus sequence). We will be performing population recordings in behaving animals, optogenetic experiments and manipulations of synaptic plasticity mechanisms during task learning. 

We offer a full-time three-year position with a competitive PhD salary. Starting date should be between February and June 2023. Candidates interested in the position, please send an email to Jaime de la Rocha before the end of 2022 with a motivation letter explaining their suitability for the position, a curriculum vitae and the contact details of two referees (indicate “CRCNS PhD application” in the email’s subject).

Our lab, headed by Albert Compte and Jaime de la Rocha, offers an interdisciplinary stimulating environment that values rigor, collaboration, close mentoring and critical but positive thinking. We are also an active member of the Barcelona Cognitive Computational and Systems Neuroscience community (barccsyn.org) which connects a large number of groups in Barcelona with common interests and complementary approaches.

If you’re interested in any of the positions please contact Jaime de la Rocha (JROCHAV@recerca.clinic.cat) or Manuel Molano (manuelmolanomazon@gmail.com).  More details about the position can be found here.