We are seeking a creative and motivated neuroscientist to investigate the mechanisms of flexible learning and decision-making. The postholder will join the Adaptive Decisions Lab (Principal Investigator: Dr Abhishek Banerjee) to lead a research programme examining how the brain supports flexible behaviour in both mice and humans.
The project centres on two complementary experimental streams. In humans, the postholder will design and run high-density EEG studies in which participants perform cognitive flexibility tasks to characterise the neural signatures of adaptive decision-making. In parallel, the postholder will analyse imaging datasets acquired from mice performing analogous behavioural tasks, thereby revealing mechanisms that underpin flexibility at the cellular level.
This research forms part of Dr Banerjee's Wellcome Trust Career Development Award (2024–2032). It will be carried out in the Department of Pharmacology, University of Oxford, in collaboration with colleagues in the Departments of Psychiatry and Experimental Psychology, and international partners at ETH-Zürich, MIT, and Queen Mary University of London.
You will be required to:
- Manage own academic research and administrative activities, including detailed project planning to coordinate multiple workstreams and meet deadlines across the human and mouse experimental programmes.
- Design and run human EEG studies in which participants perform cognitive flexibility tasks (eg, reversal learning, set-shifting), including participant recruitment, data acquisition, and quality control.
- Process and analyse high-density EEG data, including artefact rejection, source localisation, time-frequency decomposition, and multivariate pattern analysis.
- Develop and apply quantitative analysis pipelines in MATLAB, incorporating dimensionality reduction (PCA, UMAP, Isomap), manifold learning, and machine-learning classifiers to extract neural geometry metrics from both species.
- Systematically compare behavioural and neural data across mice and humans, identifying conserved and divergent signatures of cognitive flexibility at the level of neural population dynamics.
- Act as a resource for other group members on EEG methodology, calcium imaging analysis, and cross-species experimental design.
You must have:
- Hold (or be close to completing) a relevant PhD/DPhil in Neuroscience or a related subject.
- Demonstrated experience in designing and running EEG studies with human participants performing decision-making or cognitive flexibility tasks, including hands-on expertise in data acquisition, preprocessing, and analysis.
- Demonstrable experience in directly comparing behaviour and neural responses across mice and humans, including alignment of task structures, variables, and metrics across species.
- Strong quantitative and programming skills in MATLAB, with the ability to build and maintain reproducible analysis pipelines.
- Working knowledge of machine learning methods relevant to neural data, including dimensionality reduction (eg, PCA, UMAP, NNMF), manifold learning, and supervised classification.
The post is fixed term for 12 months, funded by the Wellcome Trust. The closing date for applications is 12noon on Tuesday 7 July 2026.
