Research Scientist Engineer, Functional Ultrasound Imaging

Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better future. We believe the coming years will bring an era of unprecedented scientific and technological advancement as exponential progress in AI converges with central advances in other fields to accelerate innovation. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally rethink the institutions systems and tools that drive progress. We have committed a $3.5B endowment to that work and fit the form of our support to the function it serves: grants investments and in-house research programs. We accept meaningful risk in the research we back and expect some of it to fail because transformative ideas are rarely the ones already proven. Our projects and the foundation itself operate like high-velocity startups with a high performance bar and competitive compensation to match. We are searching for leaders who are compelled by the challenge of driving high-impact change in the way science is funded conducted and communicated. You can read more about our mission vision and programming at Overview

Astera Neuro seeks to understand and engineer consciousness. We believe consciousness is the process by which the brain builds a coherent internal model of the world and the self. We aim to understand this model and to develop the technologies to write experience directly into the brain. By combining large-scale neural recording causal perturbation and brain-based AI we seek to move neuroscience from observing correlates of experience to engineering it. The same tools carry direct therapeutic promise for neurological and psychiatric diseases that alter perception thought and sense of self. Because the science and tools required do not yet exist we are assembling a founding team of neuroscientists theorists and engineers to create them. We do high-risk high-reward science in a well-resourced collaborative environment with competitive pay and share everything openly under Asteras Open Science Policy.

You will develop Astera Neuros volumetric fUSI platform for primates working across hardware experimentation and computational analysis. From implementing the imaging system and designing experiments to analyzing large-scale datasets and building functional brain atlases youll help create one of the worlds most advanced platforms for mesoscale imaging of the primate brain.

Youll work alongside engineers software developers neuroscientists veterinarians and external collaborators in an interdisciplinary team focused on creating technologies that enable fundamentally new neuroscience. Animal wellbeing is foundational to this work supported by dedicated veterinary and behavioral care staff and rigorous welfare standards.

• Build validate and optimize a large-scale volumetric functional ultrasound imaging platform for awake behaving primates.

• Design and execute multimodal neuroscience experiments combining fUSI with behavioral paradigms and complementary recording and perturbation techniques.

• Develop robust computational pipelines for image reconstruction preprocessing registration quality control statistical analysis and visualization.

• Analyze large-scale functional imaging datasets using modern statistical and machine learning approaches.

• Register imaging data across sessions and animals to generate high-resolution anatomical and functional brain atlases.

• Integrate fUSI with electrophysiology and other neural recording and perturbation modalities to create comprehensive maps of brain function.

• Collaborate closely with engineers and software developers to continuously improve imaging hardware and acquisition software.

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

• Publish scientific discoveries using Open Science and FAIR principles and contribute to open datasets software and technical documentation.

Required

• PhD with 4-12 years of experience in neuroscience bioengineering physics electrical engineering or a related field is preferred. Equivalent demonstrated expertise will also be considered.

• Experience with in vivo functional ultrasound imaging or with comparable high-resolution neuro imaging technologies.

• Experience designing and executing neuroscience experiments in primates including awake macaque fMRI.

• Strong scientific programming skills in Python and/or MATLAB.

• Understanding of primate neuroanatomy image registration and atlas construction.

• Experience with image reconstruction and signal processing.

• Experience analyzing large-scale imaging electrophysiology or multimodal neuroscience datasets including with machine learning or computational neuroscience methods.

• Ability to work at close quarters with software engineers hardware engineers and neuroscientists in a fast-moving multi-team environment.

• Track record of mentorship and technical leadership.

• Conviction that the brains internal model can be understood in full and recognition that getting there requires a kind of science no single academic lab can do. We are betting on scale on deep collaboration across science and engineering and on open sharing of ideas and expertise in a full-stack environment.

• Appetite for building a capability that does not yet exist. You enjoy building new experimental systems as much as answering scientific questions and you are comfortable moving between hardware software and data analysis.

• Willingness to be held to an engineering standard. Our decisive tests are write-in experiments: constructing a specific percept thought or internal state not merely decoding one. What we cannot build we do not understand.

• Comfort building on shared infrastructure rather than private projects. Recordings and perturbations will be registered onto a common whole-brain functional and anatomical atlas and datasets are designed to stitch across sessions animals and paradigms.

• Commitment to open science. We will release tools data and methods and we aim to create a new dynamic of rapid open exchange in neuroscience.

We are seeking an exceptional Research Scientist or Research Engineer to lead the development of a next-generation functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) platform for whole-brain imaging in awake behaving primates. This is an opportunity to build a unique experimental capability from the ground up and generate datasets that could redefine how large-scale neural activity is measured. If you enjoy designing sophisticated experimental systems solving challenging technical problems and combining engineering neuroscience and computation into a single platform wed love to hear from you.

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!