Postdoc in Cognitive Neuroscience

Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics within the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University invites applications for a postdoctoral position in cognitive neuroscience. The position is affiliated with the research project ‘The re-integration of the cerebellum’ funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (see more here).

The postdoctoral researcher position is a full time and fixed-term position. The position begins on 1 September 2025 or as soon as possible thereafter until 29 February 2028.

The School of Communication and Culture is committed to diversity and encourages all qualified applicants to apply regardless of their personal background.

Project

Building precise and accurate sensory expectations relies on the cerebellum. In the current project, we investigate not only the role of the cerebellum, but also that of the basal ganglia and the thalamus in building precise and accurate sensory expectations. We do this by investigating patients with deep brain stimulation, such as Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor, using a combination of behavioural paradigms, magnetoencephalography and recording of local field potentials.

The project is carried out in collaboration with the Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (see more here) and the Department of Neurosurgery at Aarhus University Hospital, which houses state-of-the-art systems for recording magnetoencephalography (SQUIDs and optically pumped magnetometers), local field potentials (Percept™ neurostimulator) and for acquiring magnetic resonance images. 

Postdoctoral researcher position

Your main tasks will consist of

• Planning, running and analysing experiments including healthy controls, Parkinson’s disease patients and essential tremor patients measured with magnetoencephalography and local field potentials acquired with deep brain neurostimulators (Percept™)
• Designing, planning, running and analysing behavioural experiments, in collaboration with the Principal Investigator, that unfold the role of how accurate and precise temporal sensory expectations may inform behaviour
• Presenting results at conferences and publishing in international journals.

Teaching and supervision

As a postdoctoral researcher in cognitive neuroscience your position is primarily research-based, but it will also involve a small degree of teaching and supervision. To that end, the successful applicant will be expected to take part in the department’s teaching and supervision activities and to teach and supervise on BSc or MSc levels. Relevant courses could for example be Cognitive Neuroscience and Advanced Cognitive Neuroscience. The successful applicant is expected to teach one of these courses once during the employment period

Given the international focus of the degree programme, the successful applicant will be expected to teach in English.

Qualifications

Applicants must have a PhD degree or must document equivalent qualifications in a relevant field related to cognitive neuroscience. 

In your application, please provide documentation in your research statement showing how your profile and skills fit those required for the present project on sensory expectations and the cerebellum. Please also include at least one idea for an experiment in this field, including a hypothesis and the tools and methods you would use for running and analysing this experiment (maximum three pages in total). Make sure that this experiment involves a behavioural component that would be interesting to investigate in its own right. 

Read more at arts.au.dk/en

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