We expect to hire two postdoctoral research fellows, one experimentalist and one theorist, to work on the ERC Synergy Grant, CeLEARN: Learning in Single Cells through Dynamical Internal Representations (see here and here), in close collaboration with Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo's lab at UPF. The other investigators on the grant are Aneta Koseska at the MPI for Neurobiology of Behaviour in Bonn and Dietmar Schmucker at the University of Bonn. For more background on cell learning, see the following papers.
The two positions have the following goals.
Experimental postdoc. Develop experimental approaches to studying learning in individual mammalian cells, following two potential paths. First, by following up the studies of habituation — the simplest form of learning — of the secretory response of neuroendocrine PC12 cells undertaken by Dan Koshland in the 1990s (for further details, see Eckert et al, Current Biology, 2024); extending these findings to other secretory cells and identifing the underlying molecular mechanisms. Second, by using programmable microfluidic devices to construct complex environments in a controlled way, so that their information content is known, and using imaging and genetics to characterise how that information becomes represented within individual mammalian cells.
Theory postdoc. Develop mathematical theory and computational algorithms for identifying low-dimensional encodings of high-dimensional environmental data, using methods like the information bottleneck and autoencoders, so as to suggest candidates for learned internal representations within cells and work with the experimentalists on the project to test these hypotheses.
These positions should be available from September 2025, when my lab is expected to open at UPF. For more details, please contact me.
The lab has a tradition of recruiting undergraduate students for summer internships and rotations. Please contact me if you are interested.