Research Scientist / Engineer, Functional Ultrasound Imaging

Company Overview

Astera Neuro is a philanthropically funded research organization within the Astera Institute, working to decipher and ultimately write the neural codes underlying perception, thought, behavior, and internal state. The tools this requires do not yet exist. We are assembling a founding team of experimental neuroscientists, computational scientists, and engineers to build them, from recording and interface hardware to software and computational methods, and to use them to study neural activity at unprecedented scale, with direct promise for treating neurological and psychiatric disease. We pursue high-risk, high-reward science in a collaborative, well-resourced environment and share our tools, data, and discoveries openly under Astera's Open Science Policy.

Position Summary

We are seeking an exceptional Research Scientist or Research Engineer to lead the development of a next-generation functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) platform for whole-brain imaging in awake, behaving macaques. Astera Neuro is focused on answering the hardest and least understood questions in neuroscience: how the brain generates thoughts, intelligence, and consciousness. Answering them requires seeing activity across the whole brain at once, in animals that are awake and behaving, and we believe functional ultrasound imaging can deliver this capability.

You will develop Astera Neuro's volumetric fUSI platform for macaques, working across hardware, experimentation, and computational analysis. From implementing the imaging system and designing experiments to analyzing large-scale datasets and building functional brain atlases, you will help create one of the world's most advanced platforms for mesoscale imaging of the primate brain. You will work alongside engineers, software developers, neuroscientists, veterinarians, and external collaborators to create technologies that enable fundamentally new neuroscience. All animal research is conducted under IACUC-approved protocols with a deep commitment to animal welfare and AAALAC standards.

What You Will Do

• Build, validate, and optimize a large-scale volumetric functional ultrasound imaging platform for awake, behaving macaques.

• 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.

Who You Are

Required:

• Conviction that the brain's internal model can be understood in full, and recognition that getting there requires a kind of science no single academic lab can do. We are betting on scale, on deep collaboration across science and engineering, and on open sharing of ideas and expertise in a full-stack environment.

• Appetite for building a capability that does not yet exist. You enjoy building new experimental systems as much as answering scientific questions, and you are comfortable moving between hardware, software, and data analysis.

• Willingness to be held to an engineering standard. Our decisive tests are write-in experiments: constructing a specific percept, thought, or internal state, not merely decoding one. What we cannot build, we do not understand.

• Comfort building on shared infrastructure rather than private projects. Recordings and perturbations will be registered onto a common whole-brain functional and anatomical atlas, and datasets are designed to stitch across sessions, animals, and paradigms. This means designing experiments others can build on, and building on theirs.

• Commitment to open science. We will release tools, data, and methods, and we aim to create a new dynamic of rapid, open exchange in neuroscience.

Preferred/Nice to Have:

• Hands on 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.

Education

• PhD in neuroscience, bioengineering, physics, electrical engineering, or a related field is preferred. Equivalent demonstrated expertise will also be considered.

Compensation

The posted salary range is based on location in the Bay Area. The successful candidate will receive a competitive compensation package, including comprehensive benefits, commensurate with their experience.

Why Join Us

This is a rare opportunity to build a unique experimental capability from the ground up and generate datasets that could redefine how large-scale neural activity is measured. You will work in an environment where engineering and science are tightly coupled. If you enjoy designing sophisticated experimental systems, solving challenging technical problems, and combining engineering, neuroscience, and computation into a single platform, we would love to hear from you.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity and inclusion.