Research Scientist, Multiregional Electrophysiology of Rodent Cognition

Job Description

Job Description

About Astera

Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better future. We believe the coming years will bring an era of unprecedented scientific and technological advancement as exponential progress in AI converges with central advances in other fields to accelerate innovation. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally rethink the institutions, systems, and tools that drive progress. We have committed a $3.5B endowment to that work and fit the form of our support to the function it serves: grants, investments, and in-house research programs. We accept meaningful risk in the research we back and expect some of it to fail because transformative ideas are rarely the ones already proven. Our projects, and the foundation itself, operate like high-velocity startups, with a high performance bar and competitive compensation to match. We are searching for leaders who are compelled by the challenge of driving high-impact change in the way science is funded, conducted, and communicated. You can read more about our mission, vision, and programming at astera.org/vision.

Astera Neuro seeks to understand and engineer consciousness. We believe consciousness is the process by which the brain builds a coherent internal model of the world and the self. We aim to understand this model and to develop the technologies to write experience directly into the brain. By combining large-scale neural recording, causal perturbation, and brain-based AI, we seek to move neuroscience from observing correlates of experience to engineering it. The same tools carry direct therapeutic promise for neurological and psychiatric diseases that alter perception, thought, and sense of self. Because the science and tools required do not yet exist, we are assembling a founding team of neuroscientists, theorists, and engineers to create them. We do high-risk, high-reward science in a well-resourced, collaborative environment with competitive pay, and share everything openly under Astera's Open Science Policy.

We are seeking an experimental neuroscientist to join Astera Neuro's rodent neuroscience team and use large-scale neural recordings to investigate how the brain builds and uses an internal model of the world. You will help define the cognitive processes and behavioral paradigms that make this question experimentally tractable in mice.

You will use high-density, multiregional electrophysiology to reveal how information is represented, transformed, and communicated across brain areas during cognition. By combining these recordings with precise optical perturbation, you will test the causal mechanisms that shape an animal's cognitive state and the contents of its internal model. This is an end-to-end experimental role spanning task design, surgery, Neuropixels recording, perturbation, and large-scale neural data analysis. Animal wellbeing is foundational to this work, supported by dedicated veterinary and behavioral care staff and rigorous welfare standards.

• Help define the cognitive processes and experimental questions we pursue in mice, and design and iterate head-fixed behavioral paradigms to probe them.

• Perform high-density, multiregional electrophysiology (Neuropixels), recording many single neurons across multiple brain areas simultaneously during behavior.

• Combine electrophysiology with two-photon imaging and holographic photostimulation, perturbing specific neural activity patterns while recording their consequences across brain areas.

• 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.

Required:

• PhD with 0–4 years of experience in neuroscience, bioengineering, physics, or a related field, or equivalent research experience. We value demonstrated skill and relevant experience above credentials.

• 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.

Preferred/Nice to Have:

• Experience combining electrophysiology with optical methods: two-photon calcium imaging, optogenetics, or SLM-based holographic photostimulation.

• Experience with multi-area or brain-wide recording and analyses of inter-areal interactions and effective connectivity.

• Prior systems neuroscience research on cognition, including working memory, decision-making, perception, or motor/premotor circuits.

• Familiarity with viral tools and transgenic mouse lines for targeted recording and manipulation, including soma-targeted opsins such as ChRmine.

Lead a program to record and causally probe the multiregional circuits of cognition, recording from many neurons across the brain at once while perturbing activity at single-cell resolution. You will help define the cognitive processes we pursue and build the experimental and analytical pipeline the program depends on. This work sits within Astera Neuro's larger effort to understand how the brain generates thought, intelligence, and internal state. Join Astera Neuro to advance our understanding of brain structure and function.

Astera Neuro provides a comprehensive benefits package and total compensation that is competitive and commensurate with the level of experience and qualifications.

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

Compensation Range: $125K - $175K