Research Fellow - GPS

About us

At UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (ICN), we undertake world-leading research in human mind and brain, in both health and disease. We bring together researchers from different disciplines such as psychology, neurology and psychiatry. Prof Rick Adams is a leader in the field of Computational Psychiatry – the application of computational methods to psychiatric neuroscience. He holds dual appointments in the Department of Computer Science and the ICN. The ICN is a world-renowned neuroscience research centre within UCL Neuroscience, one of the best neuroscience departments worldwide. UCL is a world-leader in the fusion of neuroscience and AI research, exemplified by its NeuroAI initiative. Co-I Dr Maria Eckstein is a computational neuroscientist with affiliations at UCL, Berkeley and DeepMind. Co-Is Dr Matthew Nour and Dr Mohamady El-Gaby are based in the University of Oxford, departments of Psychiatry and Experimental Psycholo gy respectively. A key collaborator on this project will be Prof Neil Burgess FRS (also based in the ICN, UCL), an authority on hippocampal-prefrontal interactions.

About the role

This postdoctoral position is part of an exciting Wellcome Mental Health Award: ‘Goal-planning in Psychosis: a study across humans, mice and neural networks’. The project will investigate the neural and computational properties underlying goal-planning in people with psychosis and genetic mouse models of psychosis. It is based on Mohamady El-Gaby’s recent work (El-Gaby et al, 2024, Nature) identifying frontal circuits in mice that permit planning by mapping information from a hippocampal world-model into goal-centred coordinates.

This postdoctoral fellow’s job will include:

- Training artificial neural networks with hippocampal-like and prefrontal-like elements to perform planning tasks

- Investigating failure modes of this system and how they relate to circuit dysfunctions in psychosis risk

- Fitting interpretable recurrent neural network models to large-scale human planning data

This role meets the eligibility requirements for a skilled worker certificate of sponsorship or a global talent visa under UK Visas and Immigration legislation. Therefore, UCL welcomes applications from international applicants who require a visa.

About you

The candidate must have a PhD in a field directly relevant to the project, e.g. computational neuroscience, biophysical modelling, physics, or engineering. Experience with neural network modelling is highly desirable. Also desirable is an interest in the application of these methods to mental health neuroscience. The candidate must have a proven track record of high quality published work within their field.

What we offer

As well as the exciting opportunities this role presents, we also offer some great benefits, please search for 'UCL rewards and benefits'.

Our commitment to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

As London’s Global University, we know diversity fosters creativity and innovation, and we want our community to represent the diversity of the world’s talent. We are committed to equality of opportunity, to being fair and inclusive, and to being a place where we all belong. We therefore particularly encourage applications from candidates who are likely to be underrepresented in UCL’s workforce. These include people from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds; disabled people; LGBTQI+ people; and for our Grade 9 and 10 roles, women.

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