Research Scientist / Engineer, Functional Ultrasound Imaging

Astera Institute•Emerybille, CA

3d•Onsite

About The Position

Astera Neuro is a philanthropically funded research organization within the Astera Institute, focused on deciphering and writing the neural codes underlying perception, thought, behavior, and internal state. The organization is assembling a founding team of experimental neuroscientists, computational scientists, and engineers to build the necessary tools, from recording and interface hardware to software and computational methods. These tools will be used to study neural activity at unprecedented scale, with the direct promise of treating neurological and psychiatric disease. Astera Neuro pursues high-risk, high-reward science in a collaborative, well-resourced environment with competitive compensation, and shares its tools, data, and discoveries openly under Astera's Open Science Policy. This position specifically involves developing Astera Neuro's volumetric fUSI platform for primates, spanning hardware, experimentation, and computational analysis. The role will contribute to creating one of the world's most advanced platforms for mesoscale imaging of the primate brain by implementing the imaging system, designing experiments, analyzing large-scale datasets, and building functional brain atlases. The position is within an interdisciplinary team focused on creating technologies for new neuroscience, with a strong emphasis on animal wellbeing.

Requirements

Experience with in vivo functional ultrasound imaging, or with comparable high-resolution neuroimaging technologies.
Experience designing and executing neuroscience experiments in primates, including awake macaque fMRI.
Strong scientific programming skills in Python and/or MATLAB.
Understanding of primate neuroanatomy, image registration, and atlas construction.
Experience with image reconstruction and signal processing.
Experience analyzing large-scale imaging, electrophysiology, or multimodal neuroscience datasets, including with machine learning or computational neuroscience methods.
Ability to work at close quarters with software engineers, hardware engineers, and neuroscientists in a fast-moving, multi-team environment.
Track record of mentorship and technical leadership.

Nice To Haves

PhD with 4-12+ years of experience in neuroscience, bioengineering, physics, electrical engineering, or a related field is preferred. Equivalent demonstrated expertise will also be considered.

Responsibilities

Build, validate, and optimize a large-scale volumetric functional ultrasound imaging platform for awake, behaving primates.
Design and execute multimodal neuroscience experiments combining fUSI with behavioral paradigms and complementary recording and perturbation techniques.
Develop robust computational pipelines for image reconstruction, preprocessing, registration, quality control, statistical analysis, and visualization.
Analyze large-scale functional imaging datasets using modern statistical and machine learning approaches.
Register imaging data across sessions and animals to generate high-resolution anatomical and functional brain atlases.
Integrate fUSI with electrophysiology and other neural recording and perturbation modalities to create comprehensive maps of brain function.
Collaborate closely with engineers and software developers to continuously improve imaging hardware and acquisition software.
Mentor research technicians, and at the senior or principal level, more junior scientists and engineers; contribute to hiring, onboarding, and lab culture.
Publish scientific discoveries using Open Science and FAIR principles, and contribute to open datasets, software, and technical documentation.