Associate Research Scientist, Center for Computational Neuroscience

Description

The Simons Foundation is a private foundation established in 1994 in New York City by Jim and Marilyn Simons. With an annual grants and programs budget of $450 million, the foundation’s mission is to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences. The foundation pursues its mission through its grant-making division, comprising programs in Mathematics and Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, Outreach and Education, and autism research, and through its internal research division, the Flatiron Institute. The Mathematics and Physical Sciences program supports work in mathematics, theoretical computer science and theoretical physics. The Life Sciences program works to advance basic research in life sciences, with, among other efforts, large grant programs in ocean ecology and in the origins of life.The Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) is a campaign that aims to improve the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of autism by funding innovative research of the highest quality and relevance. SFARI also supports the editorially independent autism research news site Spectrum.

In 2016, the foundation launched the Flatiron Institute (FI), a multidisciplinary institute whose mission is to advance scientific research through computational methods, including data analysis, modeling and simulation. The FI hosts scientists and collaborating expert programmers who work to create, deploy and support new state-of-the-art computational methods.

Outreach and Education supports and promotes scientific literacy in society generally. Specifically, the program supports the nonprofit Math for America and the independent science news site, Quanta Magazine. This program’s Science Sandbox initiative seeks to unlock scientific thinking in all people, so that science becomes a more integral part of culture.

Position Summary

CCN aims to develop theories, models, and computational methods that deepen our knowledge of brain function — both in health and in disease. CCN takes a “systems" neuroscience approach, building models that are motivated by fundamental principles, that are constrained by properties of neural circuits and responses, and that provide insights into perception, cognition and behavior. This cross-disciplinary approach not only leads to the design of new model-driven scientific experiments, but also encapsulates current functional descriptions of the brain that can spur the development of new engineered computational systems, especially in the realm of machine learning. CCN’s current research groups include computational vision (Eero Simoncelli, PI), neural circuits and algorithms (Dmitri ‘Mitya’ Chklovskii, PI), neuroAI and geometry (SueYeon Chung, PI), and statistical analysis of neural data (Alex Williams, PI), and is planning to expand the number of research groups in the near term. Interested candidates should review the CCN public website for specific information, and to select a group for their primary affiliation. Visit the Flatiron Institute career page to learn more.

The Associate Research Scientist will report to the group leader for neuroscience and conduct research on one or more of the following directions: developing algorithms and software for extracting tangible descriptions from large-scale data sets of brain activity or structure, for example, extracting multi-neuronal activity traces from in vivo 2-photon calcium imaging or connectomes from electron microscopy; analyzing such descriptions to guide the development of and test theories of neural computation; developing a theory of neural computation, for example, using similarity-based objectives to derive biologically plausible online learning algorithms. This position will be based and have a principle office or workspa