Research Associate in Neuroscience

The role

Personalised neurostimulation for Parkinson's disease

We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher to join our mission to transform the development of neurostimulation interventions for Parkinson’s disease and related movement disorders.

The aim of our MRC funded project is to design personalized neurostimulation protocols for Parkinson’s patients by capitalizing on the observation that their symptoms greatly improve immediately after engaging in intense physical exercise. We will record patients’ neural activity pre- and post-exercise to identify functional connectivity patterns associated with improved movement and cognitive control. We will then develop neurostimulation strategies to facilitate the patterns and test if they can indeed improve patients mobility and cognitive task performance.

Lab environment:

Our lab is well-connected with local patient groups and with the Bristol Brain Centre, giving us strong patient buy-in and clinical support from movement disorder specialists. Our lab facilities include world-leading transcranial electrical neurostimulation equipment (Soterix HD neurostimulator) and EEG recording hardware (ANT neuro).

The position is funded by the MRC and is an open ended position with fixed funding available for 3 years.

What will you be doing?

The responsibilities of the postdoc will involve:

• Collection and analysis of electrophysiological data (EEG and LFP) in Parkinson’s patients in a set of experimental tasks, and
• development and testing of closed-loop non-invasive transcranial electrical neurostimulation protocols that will manipulate functional neural connectivity

You will be embedded within a multidisciplinary and highly collaborative team of researchers and a vibrant Neuroscience community. The project will provide training in working with patients and collecting and analysing high-quality electrophysiological data. You will have ample opportunities to grow in areas of behavioural and neural data analyses, and in developing and testing novel neurostimulation protocols.

You will also be supported to present your work at conferences, and will contribute to publishing research papers.

You should apply if

You should hold (or will be close to receiving) a PhD in Neuroscience, Biomedical Engineering or related disciplines and have prior experience in analysing and visualising neuroscientific data using Matlab, Python or similar languages. You should have a good understanding of analysis techniques to study neural oscillations and functional connectivity and should be proficient in experiment design and inferential statistics.

Prior experience in electrophysiology including electroencephalography or local field potentials, and experience in designing and conducting neurostimulation studies is desirable but not necessary for the role. You should be well-organised, eager to learn new techniques and work as part of a group.

For any inquiries, please contact Dr Petra Fischer petra.fischer@bristol.ac.uk.   

Additional information

Contract type: Open Ended with fixed funding

Work pattern: Full or Part time

School/Unit: Physiology, Pharmacology and Neuroscience

This advert will close at 23:59 UK time on 30th September 2024

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