Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Full-time: 35 hours per week

Fixed-term: 4 years

Where discovery never stops. Be part of something bigger.

We are looking for a postdoctoral research fellow in systems neuroscience to study the mechanisms underlying flexible switching of motor actions during natural behaviours. We aim to determine the neural logic of flexible behavioural switching by exploring continuous adaptive brain-to-spinal cord communication.

The Opportunity:

Continuously interacting with our environment requires flexible switching of motor actions from rhythmic walking and climbing to obstacle avoidance, reaching and object manipulation. This effortless process requires continuous communication between brain and spinal cord, but the circuit basis and neural logic of how flexible action switching occurs remains unclear. The goal of the project is to determine how descending information from supraspinal centres influences spinal cord computations to drive continuous and flexible action switching during naturalistic behaviours. To do this, we will combine advanced high-density neural and muscle recording techniques across the lifetime with viral-based manipulations, in silico modelling and motion tracking in mice exploring a naturalistic playground. If you are interested in our approaches to understand brain-to-spinal cord communication and would like to know more, you can contact me directly by email (Ian.Duguid@ed.ac.uk) or via social media (@Ian_Duguid on X or @ianduguid.bsky.social on Bluesky). Please include both a CV and cover letter in your application.

Environment: The candidate will join our multi-disciplinary research team who use electrophysiology, imaging and viral-based manipulation techniques combined with computational modelling and motion tracking to explore how distributed circuit computations shape naturalistic behaviours (duguidlab.com). We promote a team-based approach to science in a highly collaborative environment working alongside cellular and systems neuroscience research groups in the Institute for Neuroscience and Cardiovascular research (INCR, tinyurl.com/INCRUoE) and Simons Initiative for the Developing Brain (sidb.org.uk) at The University of Edinburgh.

This post is full-time (35 hours per week) and 100% on campus.

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