Postdoctoral Fellow: Center for Open Neuroscience

Dartmouth College • Hanover, NH

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Center for Open Neuroscience (CON) in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College invites applications for a Postdoctoral Researcher to advance the science of neuroscience data management, standardization, and reproducible workflows. This is a research-focused position at the intersection of neuroinformatics, data science, and open standards development -- an opportunity to shape how the field organizes, shares, and reuses its data. The postdoctoral researcher will lead efforts to curate and wrangle neuroimaging and neurophysiology datasets from the Dartmouth Brain Imaging Center and major public archives (DANDI, EMBER, OpenNeuro), converting raw acquisitions into standards-compliant formats and developing best practices for data quality assurance. A core part of the role involves research contributions to the development and refinement of community data standards -- the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS), Neurodata Without Borders (NWB), Hierarchical Event Descriptors (HED), and related specifications -- as well as designing and evaluating reproducible analysis workflows built on versioned data management tools such as DataLad. This is a collaborative position spanning multiple NIH BRAIN Initiative-funded projects. You will work closely with Yaroslav O. Halchenko at Dartmouth College and interact regularly with collaborators across institutions and countries, including developers, standards architects, and neuroscience researchers. The position offers opportunities to publish first-author research, present at scientific conferences, and build leadership within the open neuroscience community. For more information on our work, please visit the Center for Open Neuroscience. The Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth offers the best of a well-resourced, externally funded research university environment along with the integrative and cross-disciplinary nature of a liberal arts institution. In particular, our state-of-the-art research and teaching facility houses human cognitive/social neuroscience and small-animal behavioral/systems neuroscience in the same building. Beyond the department, postdoctoral scholars are supported by the Guarini School for Graduate and Advanced Studies. The broader neuroscience community includes research programs in the Department of Biological Sciences, Geisel School of Medicine, Thayer School of Engineering, and the cross-departmental Integrative Neuroscience at Dartmouth (IND) graduate program. Dartmouth is committed to academic excellence and encourages the open exchange of ideas within a culture of mutual respect. Dartmouth welcomes people with different backgrounds, life experiences, and perspectives and believes that diversity in all its forms enhances academic excellence. Applicants should address in their cover letter how their research, teaching, service, and/or life experiences prepare them to serve Dartmouth’s commitment to academic excellence in an environment that is welcoming to all.

Requirements

• PhD in neuroscience, neuroinformatics, computer science, biomedical engineering, or a closely related field, or be ABD with a degree expected by the start of the appointment.
• Hands-on experience with neuroimaging or neurophysiology data: acquisition pipelines, preprocessing workflows, or data curation at scale.
• Familiarity with neuroscience data standards: BIDS, NWB, or HED.
• Solid programming skills in Python and comfort with version control (git).
• A track record of scientific publication and an interest in research on reproducibility, data management methodologies, or standards development.
• Ability to work collaboratively in a distributed, international team and to communicate effectively with both technical and domain audiences.
• Strong computational backgrounds who are eager to develop neuroscience domain expertise, or from neuroscientists looking to deepen their informatics and data engineering skills.

Nice To Haves

• Experience contributing to standards development (specification writing, validation tools, extension proposals).
• Experience with data versioning tools: DataLad, git-annex, DVC, or similar.
• Experience curating or managing datasets for public archives: DANDI, OpenNeuro, or similar repositories.
• Contributions to open-source neuroinformatics projects: nipy, nipreps, BIDS-standard, NeurodataWithoutBorders, DataLad, or related ecosystems.
• Experience designing or evaluating reproducible analysis workflows, including containerized pipelines (Docker/Singularity) and workflow engines.
• Demonstrated efficiency with agentic AI systems for research and development: LLM-powered coding assistants, AI-augmented literature review, or automated data quality assessment.
• Familiarity with high-performance computing environments and job schedulers: SLURM, HTCondor.

Responsibilities

• Lead efforts to curate and wrangle neuroimaging and neurophysiology datasets from the Dartmouth Brain Imaging Center and major public archives (DANDI, EMBER, OpenNeuro).
• Convert raw acquisitions into standards-compliant formats.
• Develop best practices for data quality assurance.
• Contribute to the development and refinement of community data standards (BIDS, NWB, HED, and related specifications).
• Design and evaluate reproducible analysis workflows built on versioned data management tools such as DataLad.
• Publish first-author research.
• Present at scientific conferences.
• Build leadership within the open neuroscience community.

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Benefits

What This Job Offers

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