Research Scientist Engineer Functional Ultrasound Imaging
Astera Institute is an active nonprofit research institute and foundation that operates in-house neuroscience-informed AI research and funds, operates, and supports open-science programs and public goods.
About Astera Institute
Astera operates three divisions: Neuro-AI, Radial life-sciences research, and its Foundation. Its AI work pursues neuroscience-informed approaches to artificial general intelligence, while its foundation and Radial activities support open scientific infrastructure, datasets, research programs, and residencies.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will build and optimize a volumetric functional ultrasound imaging platform, run multimodal primate experiments, develop image-analysis pipelines, generate brain atlases, integrate recording modalities, and contribute to open scientific outputs.
Requirements
- PhD or equivalent demonstrated expertise in neuroscience, bioengineering, physics, electrical engineering, or a related field
- Experience with in vivo functional ultrasound imaging or comparable high-resolution neuroimaging technologies
- Experience designing and executing neuroscience experiments in primates, including awake macaque fMRI
- Scientific programming skills in Python and/or MATLAB
- Understanding of primate neuroanatomy, image registration, and atlas construction
- Experience with image reconstruction and signal processing
- Experience analyzing large-scale imaging, electrophysiology, or multimodal neuroscience datasets
- Experience with machine learning or computational neuroscience methods
- Track record of mentorship and technical leadership
Responsibilities
- Build, validate, and optimize a volumetric functional ultrasound imaging platform for awake, behaving primates
- Design and execute multimodal neuroscience experiments
- Develop computational pipelines for image reconstruction, preprocessing, registration, quality control, statistical analysis, and visualization
- Analyze large-scale functional imaging datasets
- Register imaging data across sessions and animals to generate brain atlases
- Integrate fUSI with electrophysiology and other recording and perturbation modalities
- Improve imaging hardware and acquisition software with engineers and software developers
- Mentor research technicians and junior scientists and engineers at senior or principal levels
- Contribute to open datasets, software, technical documentation, and scientific publications