Research Assistant Professor - Behavioral Neuroscience

Position Responsibilities

• Design and conduct rat behavioral experiments in models of substance use disorders (e.g., nicotine, alcohol, cocaine) and feeding disorders (e.g., binge-eating, sugar/fat overconsumption), with an emphasis on operant and appetitive conditioning paradigms.
• Analyze behavioral data and characterize reward, craving, and impulsivity-related phenotypes.
• Use Brain Maps 4.0 to register behaviorally defined recording, lesion, or stimulation sites to standardized rat-brain coordinates.
• Generate behavioral and physiological datasets that feed downstream stages of the pipeline, and integrate behavioral readouts with large-scale imaging datasets generated by team members and the Imaging & Behavioral Neuroscience Core Facility.
• Collaborate with cluster-hire colleagues in imaging, ML/AI, and software engineering on multi-modal data integration and atlas development.
• Contribute to peer-reviewed publications, federal grant applications, and the open-access digital atlas of brain reward circuits.
• Mentor graduate and undergraduate trainees to contribute their efforts to the research pipeline.

Job Requirements

• Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscience, neuroscience, psychology, biomedical sciences, or a closely related field.
• Demonstrated experience using Brain Maps 4.0 to register behavioral or other experimental data to standardized rat-brain coordinates.
• Hands-on experience conducting operant or appetitive conditioning experiments in rats (e.g., self-administration, intracranial self-stimulation, lever-pressing tasks, reinstatement, devaluation, or progressive-ratio schedules).
• Established record of in vivo experimental research in rats, evidenced by peer-reviewed publications or preprints.
• Experience teaching mesoscale brain mapping to undergraduate students.
• Demonstrated ability to work in interdisciplinary teams that integrate behavior with neural data.

Preferred Qualifications

• Graduate or postdoctoral research experience in a behavioral neuroscience or addiction research laboratory.
• Experience with calcium imaging in rat reward-circuit research (e.g., fiber photometry, miniscope, or two-photon).
• Experience with additional intracranial methods relevant to reward circuit research, such as microinfusion, chemogenetics, or in vivo electrophysiology and surgical methods such as vascular catheterization.
• Experience integrating behavioral readouts with whole-brain or mesoscale imaging datasets.
• Basic familiarity with quantitative or computational methods for behavioral data analysis (Python, MATLAB, or R), including AI/ML approaches where applicable.
• Track record of independent grant submissions or co-authored funded proposals.