Research Scientist, Multiregional Electrophysiology of Working Memory

Astera Institute•Alameda, CA

41d

About The Position

Astera Neuro, part of the Astera Institute, is building the tools to decipher and ultimately write the neural codes behind perception, thought, behavior, and internal state. Since these tools don't yet exist, we're assembling a founding team of neuroscientists, computational scientists, and engineers to build them (hardware, software, and methods) and use them to study neural activity at unprecedented scale, with direct relevance to neurological and psychiatric disease. We do high-risk, high-reward science in a well-resourced, collaborative environment with competitive pay, and share our work openly under Astera's Open Science Policy. We are seeking a PhD-level experimental neuroscientist to join Astera Neuro's rodent neuroscience team and lead high-density, multiregional electrophysiological recordings in behaving mice, revealing how the brain holds and manipulates information in working memory. The successful candidate will record from many single neurons across multiple brain areas simultaneously while animals perform a working-memory task, combine these recordings with single-cell-resolution optical perturbation to test how a held memory is maintained and communicated across areas, and build the experimental and analytical pipeline the program depends on. This is an end-to-end experimental role spanning task design, surgery, recording, and large-scale data analysis. Animal wellbeing is foundational to this work, supported by dedicated veterinary and behavioral care staff and rigorous welfare standards.

Requirements

PhD with 0–4 years of experience in neuroscience, bioengineering, physics, or a related field, or equivalent research experience.
Hands-on mouse survival surgery experience: stereotaxic injections, headbars, chronic cranial windows, and craniotomies.
Hands-on experience with in vivo extracellular electrophysiology in awake, behaving rodents, including high-density silicon probes (Neuropixels).
Proficiency in scientific computing for neural-data analysis, in Python and/or MATLAB, with Kilosort, SpikeGLX, or comparable pipelines.
Experience training head-fixed rodents on behavioral tasks.

Nice To Haves

Experience combining electrophysiology with optical methods: two-photon calcium imaging, optogenetics, or SLM-based holographic photo stimulation.
Multi-area or brain-wide recording, and analyses of inter-areal interactions and effective connectivity.
Prior systems neuroscience research in cortex, working memory, decision-making, or motor and premotor circuits.
Familiarity with viral tools and transgenic mouse lines for targeted recording and manipulation, including soma-targeted opsins such as ChRmine.

Responsibilities

Design and iterate a head-fixed mouse working-memory task, and establish reliable behavioral performance.
Perform high-density, multiregional electrophysiology (Neuropixels), recording many single neurons across multiple brain areas simultaneously during the task.
Combine electrophysiology with two-photon imaging and holographic photo stimulation to move from correlation to causal tests, perturbing the held representation while recording its brain-wide consequences.
Lead the computational analysis of large-scale neural population data, including spike sorting, dimensionality reduction, population decoding, generalized linear models, and inter-areal circuit inference.
Set the viral and transgenic expression strategy, including soma-targeted ChRmine and GCaMP for combined recording and manipulation.
Perform mouse survival surgery: stereotaxic viral injection, headbar installation, chronic cranial-window implantation, and recording craniotomies and chronic implants.
Mentor research associates and technicians and, at the senior or principal level, more junior scientists; contribute to hiring, onboarding, and lab culture.
Contribute to publications, talks, open data and tooling releases, and engagement with the broader scientific community.