Research Associate

Department of Bioengineering ·  London, United Kingdom · Full Time

Campus: White City Campus, London
Full time and Fixed term for 2.5 years, with possibility to extend up to another 2 years

Neural interfaces that record the activity of neurons in brain and the spinal cord activity have allowed us to improve our understanding of how these structures work, the changes they undergo due to disease/injury, and how technology may allow us to reverse neurological deficits. All the technologies that can detect the activity of single neurons in the brain require invasive procedures, which currently imposes a barrier to their broad adoption in healthcare. In this collaborative project, we seek to develop and validate in animal experiments minimally invasive or even non-invasive neural interfaces for single neuron recording.

You will be leading the experimental validation of the neural interfaces developed by our project partners in experiments in rodents. After pilot validation of the interfaces under anaesthesia with the assistance of the PDRAs from our partner groups, you will evaluate the novel interfaces in two scenarios that are central to rehabilitation, augmentation, and neuroscience applications: 1) “decoding” naturalistic movements from brain activity using state of the art computational approaches, and 2) close-loop brain machine interfacing.

The position is funded through a recently awarded EPSRC Transformative Healthcare Technologies for 2050 grant that seeks to bring neural interfaces for single neuron recordings out of the laboratories and ultimately into clinical practice. You will join the Be.Neuro lab, which is currently comprised of Dr. Juan Alvaro Gallego (PI), one postdoctoral researcher, four PhD students, and several undergraduate students, at the Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London. More details can be found in the Be.Neuro lab website at https://gallego.bg.ic.ac.uk/

You will lead validation tests to demonstrate that the neural interfaces developed in the project enable accurate recordings under anaesthesia and design and perform experiments to “decode” behavioural variables (e.g., muscle activations or joint kinematics) from brain activity while rats move freely on a large arena. You will lead (offline) decoding analyses, using dimensionality reduction methods such as PCA to characterize brain activity and machine learning techniques for decoding and perform brain-computer interface (BCI) experiments in which mice control a virtual cursor using a setup that will be available in the lab.

• You will hold a PhD (or equivalent) in neuroscience, biomedical engineering or a related field, and who has a background/interest in behaviour, the brain, and engineering.
• Candidates with a background in engineering/physical/computer sciences are encouraged to apply, but need to be willing to develop a solid grasp of animal physiology and behaviour.
• You will have experience in working with awake animals (ideally rodents), electrophysiological techniques, and neural and behavioural data analysis in Matlab and Python.
• Experience in stereotactic surgery techniques and electrical/mechanical engineering for building experimental setups for freely moving and head-fixed animals are preferable.

This post is full time and fixed term for 2.5 years with the possibility to extend for another 2 years.

Candidates who have not yet been officially awarded their PhD will be appointed as a Research Assistant within the salary range £36,045 – £39,183 per annum.

Informal queries relating to the position should be directed to Dr Juan Álvaro Gallego at juan-alvaro.gallego@imperial.ac.uk

Committed to equality and valuing diversity, we are an Athena SWAN Silver Award winner, a Stonewall Diversity Champion, a Disability Confident Employer and work in partnership with GIRES to promote respect for trans people.

Please click here to apply.