PhD student position on Neuroscience in Greece

About the lab:

The Systems Neuroscience lab at IMBB investigates how cortical circuits interact to form transformation-invariant object representations that can guide behavior.

About the project:

This project aims to develop a framework that will allow us to understand the algorithm used by the mouse visual cortex to extract relevant features from complex environments and guide natural behaviors. By starting with ethologically relevant behaviors, we will be able to identify these latent causes, discover how they are represented in the mouse cortical visual system and how in turn these representations affect the behavior of the animals.

Job Description:

Object recognition is a fundamental problem in visual perception and our brain is capable of accomplishing it effortlessly and in a fraction of a second, in spite of immense variation in the sensory information that arrives in our retinas. The proposed research effort aims to

• create a state-of-the-art behavioral virtual navigation system for mice,
• combine it with recent advanced functional brain recording techniques and sophisticated neural data analysis to study how objects are represented in the activity of large populations of neurons across the visual hierarchy and beyond
• causally relate these representations to the behavior of the animal.

The selected candidate will analyze high-throughput electrophysiological, calcium imaging and behavioral data to discover how the visual system solves visual inference problems in natural environments and gain better understanding of how the brain creates untangled transformation-invariant object representations in the perceptual/visual domain, that can subsequently be used to guide behavior.