Job ID: 110734

PhD position in Marseille. Striatal circuits and the exploration/exloitation dilemna

Position: Ph.D. Student

Deadline: 31 October 2023

Employment Start Date: 2 October 2023

Contract Length: 3 years

City: Marseille

Country: France

Institution: INMED/INSERM

Department:

Description:

A 3 years-long PhD position is available in the team “Cortico-Basal Ganglia Circuits and Behavior” at INMED/Marseille to study the role of the striatum in the exploration/exploitation dilemma, starting this fall 2023.

The project takes advantage of a locomotion-based naturalistic foraging task in freely moving rats combined with manipulations of striatal sub-circuits during behavior (chemo/optogenetics) and in vivo electrophysiology. It is part of an ANR-funded collaboration with David Thura and Bastien Berret to study how effort and time influence decision-making and movements across species.

We’re looking for candidates with a strong interest in animal behavior (rodents) and/or quantitative/theoretical approaches.

For postdoc applicants, having at least one of the following skills is required: rodent behavior, rodent stereotaxic injections, matlab/python analysis of behavioral/neurophysiological signals, hardware control (e.g., familiarity with microcontrollers, LabView programming), signal/image acquisition/processing, computational modeling.

More info on our team and INMED: https://bit.ly/35OL8xm

Marseille is a fun (and relatively inexpensive) city to live in and the institute is located at the entrance of one of the most spectacular natural sites in Europe: The Calanques National Park  (great for hiking, rock climbing, and free-water diving/swimming).

Formal application (CV, cover letter, 2 references) or questions to david.robbe@inserm.fr

Preferred starting dates: between 1st of September and 1st of December 2023. The position will remain open until filled.

Relevant articles:

Jurado-Parras et al., 2020, Current Biology. (link)

Sales-Carbonell et al., 2018, Current Biology (link)

Rueda-Orozco & Robbe, 2015, Nature Neuroscience (link)