Company Overview

Astera Neuro, part of the Astera Institute, is building the tools to decipher and ultimately write the neural codes behind perception, thought, behavior, and internal state. Since these tools don't yet exist, we're assembling a founding team of neuroscientists, computational scientists, and engineers to build them (hardware, software, and methods) and use them to study neural activity at unprecedented scale, with direct relevance to neurological and psychiatric disease. We do high-risk, high-reward science in a well-resourced, collaborative environment with competitive pay, and share our work openly under Astera's Open Science Policy.

Position Summary

We are seeking an experimental neuroscientist to join Astera Neuro's rodent neuroscience team and use large-scale neural recordings to investigate how the brain builds and uses an internal model of the world. You will help define the cognitive processes and behavioral paradigms that make this question experimentally tractable in mice.

You will use high-density, multiregional electrophysiology to reveal how information is represented, transformed, and communicated across brain areas during cognition. By combining these recordings with precise optical perturbation, you will test the causal mechanisms that shape an animal's cognitive state and the contents of its internal model. This is an end-to-end experimental role spanning task design, surgery, Neuropixels recording, perturbation, and large-scale neural data analysis. Animal wellbeing is foundational to this work, supported by dedicated veterinary and behavioral care staff and rigorous welfare standards.

What You'll Do

• Help define the cognitive processes and experimental questions we pursue in mice, and design and iterate head-fixed behavioral paradigms to probe them.

• Perform high-density, multiregional electrophysiology (Neuropixels), recording many single neurons across multiple brain areas simultaneously during behavior.

• Combine electrophysiology with two-photon imaging and holographic photostimulation, perturbing specific neural activity patterns while recording their consequences across brain areas.

• Lead the computational analysis of large-scale neural population data, including spike sorting, dimensionality reduction, population decoding, generalized linear models, and inter-areal circuit inference.

• Set the viral and transgenic expression strategy, including soma-targeted ChRmine and GCaMP for combined recording and manipulation.

• Perform mouse survival surgery: stereotaxic viral injection, headbar installation, chronic cranial-window implantation, and recording craniotomies and chronic implants.

• Mentor research associates and technicians and, at the senior or principal level, more junior scientists; contribute to hiring, onboarding, and lab culture.

• Contribute to publications, talks, open data and tooling releases, and engagement with the broader scientific community.

Who You Are

Required:

• PhD with 0–4 years of experience in neuroscience, bioengineering, physics, or a related field, or equivalent research experience. We value demonstrated skill and relevant experience above credentials.

• Hands-on mouse survival surgery experience: stereotaxic injections, headbars, chronic cranial windows, and craniotomies.

• Hands-on experience with in vivo extracellular electrophysiology in awake, behaving rodents, including high-density silicon probes (Neuropixels).

• Proficiency in scientific computing for neural-data analysis, in Python and/or MATLAB, with Kilosort, SpikeGLX, or comparable pipelines.

• Experience training head-fixed rodents on behavioral tasks.

Preferred/Nice to Have:

• Experience combining electrophysiology with optical methods: two-photon calcium imaging, optogenetics, or SLM-based holographic photo stimulation.

• Multi-area or brain-wide recording, and analyses of inter-areal interactions and effective connectivity.

• Prior systems neuroscience research in cortex, working memory, decision-making, or motor and premotor circuits.

• Familiarity with viral tools and transgenic mouse lines for targeted recording and manipulation, including soma-targeted opsins such as ChRmine.

Why Join Us

Lead a program to record and causally probe the multiregional circuits of working memory, recording from many neurons across the brain at once while perturbing a held memory at single-cell resolution. This work sits within Astera Neuro's larger effort to understand how the brain generates thought, intelligence, and internal state. Join Astera Neuro to advance our understanding of brain structure and function.

Astera Neuro provides a comprehensive benefits package and total compensation that is competitive and commensurate with the level of experience and qualifications.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity and inclusion!