Research Associate - Consciousness

The Institute for All Minds seeks a full-time, on-site Research Associate to experimentally investigate how the brain creates conscious experience. You will leverage a new mouse model of conscious visual perception to contribute to the identification of neural circuits that specifically cause the conscious aspect of seeing. Your work will get us closer to understanding how the brain causes conscious experience, an ancient philosophical question that underlies the core of human existence, one that we are now poised to answer.

Responsibilities

  1. Train mice, using a semi-automated bespoke virtual reality system
  2. Conduct neurosurgery, installing headplates and stereotactically targeting injections into the mouse brain
  3. Perform brain histology, using antibodies to visualize neurons and other cell types (immunohistochemistry)
  4. Analyze neuroimagery, quantifying the effects of injections on the brain with software assistance
  5. Following mastery of (1)-(4), train and manage a team of undergraduates to do (1)-(4)
  6. Care for the mouse colony, breeding specific transgenic and mutant lines and genotyping the progeny
  7. Support the development of novel behavioral assays to measure other aspects of conscious experience, including tactile and auditory perception, free will, and emotions
  8. Do whatever else is necessary for our scrappy research start-up to succeed!

Qualifications

  1. Bachelor's degree in neuroscience, biology, cognitive science, psychology, or a related field
  2. At least 1 year of prior experimental neuroscience research experience that includes
    1. Mouse training in an associative learning task
    2. Mouse stereotactic brain surgery and injection
    3. Mouse brain histology
    4. Quantitative brain image analysis
  3. A deep curiosity about the mystery of consciousness, such that reading this listing makes you excited and you obsess to learn as much as you can on consciousness and related topics
  4. A love of learning
  5. A creative problem-solver that that thinks up solutions from many divergent angles

Compensation

The Institute offers a competitive salary, paid time off, a retirement plan, medical insurance, as well as perks such as free meals, parking and 20% time to work on a project of your choice, as pioneered by Google.

About the Institute for All Minds

We take a very broad approach to our problems and strongly favor exploration over hypothesis, especially in the early stages of a project. Most hypotheses are wrong, so we are better off screening and letting the right approaches surface. We believe scientists should focus on problems that matter and ensure that time and energy are well-spent, not bogged down by unnecessary overhead and bureaucracy. We try to use the simplest words available to explain what we are doing and why we are doing it. When traditional approaches have failed, we ignore conventional thinking and try to attack a problem from first principles using methods that are most likely to provide the right answer. For these reasons we have established an independent institute rather than pursuing this work within academia.

The Institute is a 501c3 non-profit public charity dedicated to understanding (1) how the brain causes conscious experience and (2) how neurons die during neurodegeneration.

The founder, Nikhil Bhatla, PhD, has focused on scientific approaches for studying conscious experience since 2007. He received his BS at Stanford University in Product Design (Mechanical Engineering and Art) and a minor in Computer Science. Following several years working at Google, he received a PhD in Neuroscience from MIT, where he worked in a Nobel prize-winning lab. He then completed a Neuroscience postdoc at UCSF and UC Berkeley as a Miller Fellow, where he developed an innovative approach for studying conscious visual perception using mice. In 2024, he started the Institute for All Minds to continue this work in an independent, fast-paced research organization.

The Institute is located in Downtown Berkeley very close to the BART subway station, making it easily accessible by public transit from throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

Application Instructions

Please email work@iam.science describing why you are excited about this position and why it is a good fit for your interests and skills, with your resume / CV as an attachment. If your resume / CV or cover letter is generated or modified by AI, your application will NOT be considered. Please include your overall undergrad GPA (not just in your major), relevant test scores, and any calculation of class rank on your resume / CV.

We look forward to hearing from you.