Job ID: 123307

2 PhD position available on semi-naturalistic behavioral phenotyping and housing projects to increase translation

Position: Ph.D. Student

Deadline: 15 August 2025

City: nijmegen

Country: Netherlands

Institution: Donders Institute

Department:

Description:

Traditional laboratory housing and testing conditions are minimalistic and unlike natural environments, which can limit behavioral variability and reduce the relevance of brain data. These projects aim to improve translatability by creating a semi-naturalistic, enclosed habitat for rodents that combines housing and testing areas, advanced tracking (DeepLabCut), and machine learning as well as investigate the size and types of home cage housing on new phenotyping using our semi-naturalistic behavioural set ups such as the HexMaze (9mx5m maze). https://www.genzellab.com/we-are-hiring

This position is a part of the TRANSCEND doctoral network with thirteen different PhD projects in biology, engineering and philosophy that is supported by the MSCA (https://biomed.au.dk/TRANSCEND-network/). Through this action, we offer competitive salaries and exciting opportunities for tentative secondments, allowing you to gain experience across different institutions in different countries and disciplines. We strongly value the willingness and readiness toward interdisciplinary collaboration, encouraging team members to work across fields and contribute to innovative, cross-cutting projects that address complex challenges from multiple perspectives.  The projects are placed within the Semantic Memory lab (Genzel lab, www.genzellab.com) at the Donders Institute in Nijmegen and thus embedded in a basic mechanistic memory lab with a direct translational approach (working with mice, rats and humans).

We are looking for motivated candidates with a background in neuroscience and/or engineering, experience with programming (e.g. arduino/raspberry, computer vision) and/or rodent behavioural task development is beneficial. The candidate should be interested in thinking beyond boundaries and disciplines. A requirement of MSCA funded positions is mobility, thus the candidates must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in the Netherlands for more than 12 months in the 36 months immediately before their appointment.

For additional information contact Lisa Genzel, lisa.genzel@donders.ru.nl

Please send a CV (max 4 pages with publications and at least two reference contacts) and a motivation letter (max 2 pages).

Application Deadline is 15 August 23:59 CET 2025, application should be send to lisa.genzel@donders.ru.nl