Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Edinburgh)

Vacancy Reference Number
8844
Closing Date
24 Nov 2023
Salary
£37,099 - £44,263 per annum
Duration
The post is full time (35 hours per week) Fixed-Term: for 2 years, with possible extension up to 5 years.

About the job 

Dementia is the biggest health challenge of our century.

To date there is no way to prevent it or even slow its progression, and there is an urgent need to fill the knowledge gap in our basic understanding of the diseases that cause it.

The UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) is the biggest UK initiative driving forward research to fill this gap.

Researchers at the UK DRI at Edinburgh aim to piece together how all the different brain cells, systems and processes work together to keep our brains healthy over many decades. Unravelling how these finely-tuned interactions are disturbed even before a person has any specific signs or symptoms of dementia – and how changes are involved in driving disease progression – will open new avenues for the development of novel therapies.

We are looking for a Postdoctoral Research Fellow to join Dr Jian Gan’s lab in the UK Dementia Research Institute, Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences.

The Opportunity 

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral fellow position in Dr Jian Gan’s lab in the UK Dementia Research Institute, Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences, at the University of Edinburgh.

We investigate real-time neurocircuit dynamics underlying network oscillations, cognition, and decision-making in vivo. With such knowledge, we sort to elaborate on what, where, when, and how such dynamism goes wrong in disease conditions, e.g. dementia. We approach these questions by a combination of state-of-the-art methodologies in neuroscience, for instance in vivo patch-clamp recording, large-scale silicon probe recording, in vivo Ca2+ imaging, quantitative behaviours in virtual reality, and optogenetics.

Your skills and attributes for success

  • Ph.D. in neuroscience/physiology/pharmacology/psychology or related quantitative disciplines (e.g. computer science, engineering, mathematics, and physics).
  • A strong curiosity in neural circuits and animal models of neural diseases.
  • Experience in electrophysiology or Ca2+ imaging in vivo or patch-clamp recording in vitro is highly desirable.
  • Either good experimental skills or strong computational/quantitative ability.
  • Some proficiency in relevant programming languages (e.g. MATLAB, C++, Python, R) with regard to analysing electrophysiological data or signal processing of neural networks is advantageous.

Contact information

For informal inquiries please address to Dr. Jian Gan at Jian.Gan@ed.ac.uk

To apply visit https://elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/CandidateExperience/en/sites/CX_1001/job/8844