If someone’s interested in studying large-scale spatial navigation using virtual reality, multi-site electrophysiological recordings in the hippocampus and computational modeling you can apply to the newly launch Centuri PhD call project PHD2018-14.

Centuri (the Turing Center for Living Systems) is a interdisciplinary institute located in Marseille, France aiming to foster collaborations between biologist and non biologists (computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians).

This project is a join project between my lab doing large-scale electrophysiology in the hippocampus during virtual reality navigation and the lab of Hervé Rouault from Janelia farm research campus doing computer modeling.

The PhD project will have three major objectives:

• Adapt and further develop an existing virtual reality setup to create a large-scale navigation task for rats.
• Perform multi-electrode (i.e. silicon probe) recordings of dorsal and ventral hippocampal neurons activity during this task. Specifically, we will ask how the dorsal and ventral parts of the hippocampus interact during such navigation.
• Build a Continuous Attractor Neuronal Network (CANN) model fed by experimental data to decipher specific computational requirements for large-scale spatial navigation.

We are looking for a highly motivated student with a biology background and a keen interest in spatial navigation and computational neuroscience (familiarity and ease with a modern programming language is strongly recommended).

For more information please visit: http://centuri-livingsystems.org/phd2018-14/

To apply follow this link: http://centuri-livingsystems.org/application-form-phd2018-14/

Deadline for application Feb 15th

Hope to see you soon in our lab!