Research Associate (Edinburgh)

Vacancy Reference Number
8841
Closing Date
27 Nov 2023
Salary
£31,396 - £ 36,024 per annum
Duration
The post is full time (35 hours per week) Fixed-term 1 year with possibility to extend

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 Research Associate at graduate/postgraduate level to contribute to join Dr Jian Gan’s lab at the UK Dementia Research Institute, Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences.

The Opportunity

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, well-controlled quantitative behaviours in virtual reality, and optogenetics. The post will primarily involve contributing to behavioural training, data requisition, and data analysis of electrophysiological recording experiments.

Your skills and attributes for success

  • Undergraduate or Master's degree in neuroscience/bioinformatics/psychology/bioengineering or related disciplines.
  • Experience in working with experimental animals.
  • Competence in one programming language like Matlab or Python.
  • Maintain accurate and up-to-date records to document the research progress. Present data at group meetings, section meetings, and conferences to make data available for other workers. Regular reporting of progress to the PI/other members of the research team is expected. Presentation of research findings at national and international level.
  • Assist with supervision of student projects and/or instruction of students with routine lab work.

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/8841