Postdoctoral Fellow: Center for Open Neuroscience

Description

The Center for Open Neuroscience (CON) in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College invites applications for a Postdoctoral Researcher to advance the science of neuroscience data management, standardization, and reproducible workflows. This is a research-focused position at the intersection of neuroinformatics, data science, and open standards development -- an opportunity to shape how the field organizes, shares, and reuses its data.

The postdoctoral researcher will lead efforts to curate and wrangle neuroimaging and neurophysiology datasets from the Dartmouth Brain Imaging Center and major public archives (DANDI, EMBER, OpenNeuro), converting raw acquisitions into standards-compliant formats and developing best practices for data quality assurance. A core part of the role involves research contributions to the development and refinement of community data standards -- the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS), Neurodata Without Borders (NWB), Hierarchical Event Descriptors (HED), and related specifications -- as well as designing and evaluating reproducible analysis workflows built on versioned data management tools such as DataLad.

This is a collaborative position spanning multiple NIH BRAIN Initiative-funded projects. You will work closely with Yaroslav O. Halchenko at Dartmouth College and interact regularly with collaborators across institutions and countries, including developers, standards architects, and neuroscience researchers. The position offers opportunities to publish first-author research, present at scientific conferences, and build leadership within the open neuroscience community. For more information on our work, please visit the Center for Open Neuroscience.

The Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth offers the best of a well-resourced, externally funded research university environment along with the integrative and cross-disciplinary nature of a liberal arts institution. In particular, our state-of-the-art research and teaching facility houses human cognitive/social neuroscience and small-animal behavioral/systems neuroscience in the same building. Beyond the department, postdoctoral scholars are supported by the Guarini School for Graduate and Advanced Studies. The broader neuroscience community includes research programs in the Department of Biological Sciences, Geisel School of Medicine, Thayer School of Engineering, and the cross-departmental Integrative Neuroscience at Dartmouth (IND) graduate program.

Dartmouth is committed to academic excellence and encourages the open exchange of ideas within a culture of mutual respect. Dartmouth welcomes people with different backgrounds, life experiences, and perspectives and believes that diversity in all its forms enhances academic excellence. Applicants should address in their cover letter how their research, teaching, service, and/or life experiences prepare them to serve Dartmouth’s commitment to academic excellence in an environment that is welcoming to all.

This position is full-time with the start date negotiable. Residence at Dartmouth in Hanover, NH maybe either full-time or partially remote (subject to negotiation and eligibility). The initial appointment is for 12 months, with possibility of renewal. This position offers a competitive salary and benefits ($67,000 to $77,000 depending on experience). Employment is contingent on authorization to work in the United States. This position is eligible for J-1 visa sponsorship for eligible candidates.

Qualifications

Required:

• PhD in neuroscience, neuroinformatics, computer science, biomedical engineering, or a closely related field, or be ABD with a degree expected by the start of the appointment
• Hands-on experience with neuroimaging or neurophysiology data: acquisition pipelines, preprocessing workflows, or data curation at scale.
• Familiarity with neuroscience data standards: BIDS, NWB, or HED. Experience contributing to standards development (specification writing, validation tools, extension proposals) is a strong plus.
• Solid programming skills in Python and comfort with version control (git). Experience with data versioning tools: DataLad, git-annex, DVC, or similar, is highly valued.
• A track record of scientific publication and an interest in research on reproducibility, data management methodologies, or standards d