Post Doctoral.Post Doctoral.Associate

University of Pittsburgh • Pittsburgh, PA

4d • Onsite

About The Position

The University of Pittsburgh, Department of Neurological Surgery at Children's Hospital is hiring for a Post Doctoral Associate under Principal Investigator Dr. Taylor Abel. This position will be supported by a new NIH-supported research project, Dynamic Network Mechanisms of Flexible Categorization in Human Cortex, under Principal Investigator Dr. Taylor Abel. The overall goal of this project is to understand the neural mechanisms of voice-based social perception by mapping information flow across the extended human auditory ventral stream. The human brain rapidly and efficiently extracts critical social information such as speaker identity and emotion. Perceiving these nuanced social cues requires transforming continuous acoustic signals into categorical social-emotional dimensions, though the exact mechanisms underlying this transformation remain unknown. We will investigate the neural encoding, temporal dynamics, network-level interactions, and causal mechanisms that underpin the extraction of social properties from voice across auditory cortex to frontal auditory fields. This project will test the central hypothesis that social perception emerges from dynamic volleys of feedforward and feedback interactions across the ventral stream, where each region encodes acoustic-to-social category features on distinct timescales. This research leverages access to intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) to record neural signals and deliver cortical stimulation across the auditory ventral stream in awake patient-participants undergoing routine epilepsy care. Combining iEEG recordings, behavioral results of direct cortical stimulation, task-dependent paradigms, network connectivity measures, and neural encoding models, we will characterize the time-course of acoustic-to-categorical transformations and establish causal mechanisms of network nodes in this process.

Requirements

• PhD in a related field.
• Experience with neural signal processing.
• Experience with computational neuroscience.

Responsibilities

• Assist with running behavioral paradigms and collecting iEEG recordings with patients in the epilepsy monitoring unit (EMU).
• Align iEEG recordings with scalp EEG measurements.
• Perform analyses to test the main study hypotheses.
• Data preprocessing.
• Designing and implementing neural encoding models and network connectivity analyses.
• Interpreting and presenting results.
• Preparation of results for presentation locally, nationally, and internationally, as well as for publication in peer-reviewed journals.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree