Up to 6 PhD fellowships in Cognitive Neuroscience at SISSA, Trieste, Italy, to start Oct, 2020
Alessandro Treves
and focused on Maths, Physics and Neuroscience. It operates in English: many
among its students and faculty are not Italian.
The Cognitive Neuroscience Department hosts 6 research labs that study the
neuronal bases of time and magnitude processing, visual perception, motivation
and intelligence, language and reading, tactile perception and learning, and
neural computation. The Department is very inter–disciplinary; our approaches
include behavioural, psychophysics, and neurophysiological experiments with
humans and animals, as well as computational and mathematical models.
Students with diverse backgrounds (physics, math, medicine, psychology,
biology) are most welcome to apply. The Department has an exceptional track
record with highly competitive funds (recent funding includes 4 ERC and
3 Human Frontiers grants) and publication in top journals (Nature, Science,
PNAS, Current Biology). Recent placements after PhD include Harvard, MIT,
Columbia and Princeton in the US; the NTNU, Manchester and Radboud in
Europe; and Sydney University, Australia. Our alumni have been awarded 4 ERC
grants, the 2015 Kandel Young Neuroscientist Prize and the 2017 ICTP Prize.
More information about the Department is available at our website
https://phdcns.sissa.it.
The selection procedure is now open; to learn how to apply, please visit
https://phdcns.sissa.it/admission-procedure.
Please contact the PhD Coordinator (davide....@sissa.it) and/or
your prospective supervisor for more information and informal enquiries.
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Alessandro Treves
SISSA, Cognitive Neuroscience, http://people.sissa.it/~ale/limbo.html
if in, rm 241, via Bonomea 265, 34136 Trieste, Italy: +39-040-3787623
Davide Zoccolan
The Visual Neuroscience Lab led by Prof. Davide Zoccolan (https://people.sissa.it/~zoccolan/VisionLab/Home.html) at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste (www.sissa.it) is looking for a postdoctoral fellow. The position is a full-time, 2-years research fellowship with a net salary of 2,200 EUR per month and is supported by a grant of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI).
Prof. Zoccolan is one of the 7 investigators that was recently awarded a grant by SFARI with the goal of establishing the Autism Rat Models Consortium (https://www.sfari.org/2022/04/29/sfari-autism-rat-models-consortium-awardees-announced/) – a collaborative effort to advance our understanding of the behavioral and circuit neuroscience mechanisms driving autism spectrum disorder (ASD), by exploiting the rat genetic models of ASD recently developed by SFARI (https://www.sfari.org/resource/rat-models/).
The contribution of Zoccolan’s lab will be to characterize the visual abilities and underlying cortical processes of a mutant for the Scn2a gene, one of the highest-confidence ASD risk genes. This project stems from the observation that atypical sensory experience affects around 90% of autistic individuals. In the visual modality, these anomalies include a propensity to process local rather than global features of visual patterns, an inability to deploy configural processing strategies (resulting in, e.g., deficits in face discrimination), and an impairment to extract structural regularities in the sensory environment (resulting in, e.g., deficits to extract perceptual invariants).
The goal of the postdoctoral fellow will be to compare visual perceptual abilities of mutant and wildtype (WT) rats in a battery of visual discrimination tasks aimed at specifically assessing some of these processes (e.g., invariant recognition and configural processing). At the same time, he/she will investigate the neuronal correlates of these processes by performing large-scale neuronal recordings from multiple visual cortical areas of mutant and WT rats. To this aim, the postdoctoral fellow will also contribute to setting up a neurophysiology rig to carry out neuronal recordings using Neuropixel arrays.
Who we are looking for: we are seeking a highly motivated system neuroscientist with a propensity for teamwork and an interest to carry out cutting-edge research at the frontier between basic and translational science. The successful candidate must have a PhD and solid experience in: 1) training animals in behavioral (e.g., perceptual) tasks; 2) performing in-vivo neuronal recordings from either anesthetized or awake animals using electrode arrays (previous experience with Neuropixel is a plus); 3) programming with Matlab or Python for stimulus and task design and data analysis (familiarity with machine learning tools is a plus). The candidate should also have a strong publication record, as well as project management skills, critical and analytical thinking, and social and communication skills. Fluent spoken and written English is a requirement
How to Apply: the official call with instructions to apply has been published on SISSA’s website. Look at the following links:
General instructions: https://www.sissa.it/bandi/selezione-pubblica-titoli-conferimento-di-n-1-assegno-di-ricerca-area-neuroscienze-ref-prof-10
Call for applications (in English): https://www.sissa.it/system/files/bandi/Announcement_ar-fe-neur-39-2022_Zoccolan1.pdf
The deadline for submitting applications is December 1st, 2022 at 1 PM (CET). Candidates interested in this position are also invited to directly contact Prof. Zoccolan by e-mail: zocc...@sissa.it, attaching a recent CV and a motivation letter detailing research interest, experience, and career goals (max 1 page). The position must be filled between December 2022 and January 2023.
Alessandro Treves
The National Program in Theoretical and Applied Neuroscience opens up an additional possibility to join SISSA for a PhD this Fall, together with those recently admitted.
SISSA is an elite postgraduate research institution in Trieste, Italy, focusing on Maths, Physics and Neuroscience. It operates in English: many among its
students and faculty are not Italian. The Cognitive Neuroscience Department
https://phdcns.sissa.it/
hosts 7 research labs, led by D Bueti, D Zoccolan, R Rumiati, D Crepaldi, M Diamond, E Piasini and A Treves, which study the neuronal bases of time and magnitude processing, visual perception, motivation and intelligence, language and reading, tactile perception
and learning, inference and memory. Those admitted can design their own research projects within or across these labs, with a variety of approaches including behavioural, psychophysics, and neurophysiological experiments with humans and animals, computational
and mathematical models. Candidates from diverse backgrounds (eg in the hard or life sciences, linguistics, medicine or psychology) are most welcome to apply, if daring.
