Post-Doctoral Research Associate

A Post-Doctoral Research Associate post is available in the Connectomics Group directed by Greg Jefferis in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge.

Elizabeth Marin and Greg Jefferis have obtained a Wellcome Discovery Award to proofread, annotate, and analyse the first mosquito brain connectome, with an initial focus on the chemosensory circuits involved in human host-seeking. We seek to recruit a postdoc to join a small, highly collaborative project team engaged in circuit reconstruction, systematic meta annotation (especially cell types) of this novel dataset, and comparisons with Drosophilid connectomes. This work feeds into the biological question of how stereotyped/variable brain wiring is (e.g. across distantly related species in the same order). A background in insect neuroscience and experience with programmatic handling of large datasets will be essential. Prior experience with EM connectomics data and/or mosquito neurobiology is highly desirable.

About the Role

Successful candidates will join a group based in Zoology with 15 team members engaged in connectome reconstruction, data processing and computational analysis. They will interact closely with a similar team at Harvard Medical School (Wei-Chung Allen Lee) as well as experimental groups at the MRC LMB in Cambridge (Greg Jefferis) and Boston University (Meg Younger, leading mosquito researcher). Candidates will need to be highly motivated and develop a good understanding of the nature of the data and the scientific aims of the project. This will be critical to setting project priorities and eventually to leading on manuscript preparation and potentially developing open source tools for processing, annotation and analysis of connectomics data. Close teamwork and a collaborative spirit will be essential, but team members will have increasing opportunities for scientific independence as their expertise develops. Candidates will report to a co-Principal Investigator based in Zoology and will be mentored by an experienced post-doc. There will be opportunities to contribute to training new team members as the group expands and to general project management, as well as to participate in public engagement activities.