Postdoctoral Scientist in Cambourne

Key responsibilities:

• Within the overall direction of the programme, the group, the remit of the project and in discussion with the Group Leader, you will make a significant input into determining the direction of the project within a two-year lifespan.
• To plan your own work and objectives on a 12-month basis and manage your experimental work within the project along with your Supervisor.
• To work with limited supervision to identify, develop, modify and apply the necessary techniques to achieve the goals of the project.
• To introduce and apply new techniques across a wide range of disciplines and to have the creativity and initiative to develop novel approaches and methods where required.
• To ensure the research is carried out in accordance with good practice and in compliance with local policies and legal requirements.
• To contribute to the smooth running of the group, including the effective use of resources, training of others and taking responsibility for use of communal facilities.
• To enhance your research and generic skills through a tailored development programme.

Working relationships:

You will report to Dr Albert Cardona and will interact and collaborate with other Postdoctoral Scientists, Research Support staff and students, not only in your group, but also across the LMB and with external groups as necessary.

Additional information:

This is a two-year training and development position for a Postdoctoral Scientist who has recently completed their doctoral studies, is moving into a new research discipline or has limited experience of key transferable skills. We support Postdoctoral Scientists with a range of formal and on-the-job training, including:

• MRC training courses.
• External training and personal development courses.
• One-to-one training with your Supervisor and other Scientists.

You will commit to undertaking the following:

• Developing and following a personal development plan.
• Attending training courses.
• Identifying additional training which will support you to develop your career.

Person Specification:

Academic qualifications: These should include a PhD (or due to complete within 6 months) in neuroscience, or in a related field (physics, computer science, applied math, or biology in a quantitative programme within a computational group) where the research project broadly meets the scope of connectomics: bioimage informatics applied to large-scale volumetric densely-labelled data for circuit mapping and analysis, or at least, bioimage informatics applied to neuroscience data such as neuronal activity imaging, neuronal activity monitoring, behavioural tracking, or transcriptomics of neural tissue.

Technical skills and expertise: Experience of and ability to perform techniques relevant to the project. The ideal candidate will have a background in neuroscience with expertise in bioimage informatics, with demonstrable experience in computer vision and machine learning applied to image datasets from biology laboratories.

Experience in at least one of the following is essential:

• Experience in neurobiology of Drosophila melanogaster or another laboratory animal model with a powerful genetic toolkit for the manipulation and monitoring of neuronal activity.
• Experience in neuroscience datasets relevant for connectomics.
• Experience in mapping neural circuits.
• Ability to work with version control software.
• Experience in the development and application of machine learning techniques to bioimage informatics for image segmentation and instance reconstruction.
• Experience in managing large datasets using system administrator skills in Linux and *BSD servers, and knowledge of databases such as PostgreSQL.
• Experience in the use of the Python programming language.
• Knowledge of Fiji and Napari software ecosystems as a user and ideally also as a software developer.

In addition:

• Ability to write scientific manuscripts.
• Ability to travel and to present to scientific conferences.
• Ability to travel for work to visit other laboratories to work in collaboration.

Track record of research: This will include achievements, and contributions to published papers, as well as to open source software published in online version-controlled repositories, and datasets.