We are always interested in hearing from potential postdocs. Please contact Cian early and we can work on figuring out funding. Options include:
Current opening: NeuroAI approaches to understanding inter-individual differences in cognition and psychiatric disorders
Collaboration with Prof Liam McDaid (Ulster University) and Dr Kevin Mitchell (Trinity College Dublin).
An important unsolved problem in psychology and neuroscience is: what determines the cognitive differences between individual people? And relatedly, why do some people develop psychiatric disorders while others don’t? One clue may come from the fact that human brain wiring is partially specified by our genomes. Modern genetics has found that a large fraction of both inter-individual cognitive differences and psychiatric disorder risk is due to inter-individual variations in our DNA: for example autism is believed to be ~80 percent genetic, while schizophrenia is ~50 percent genetic Mitchell 2018.
Understanding how genes affect cognition requires understanding how the genome sets the rules for brain wiring during early development, which, in combination with a person’s life experience, results in their particular cognitive profile.
In this project, the PhD student will build and study biologically-plausible deep neural networks as simplified models human brains Doerig et al 2023. Standard artificial neural networks will be adapted with biological components such as neuronal cell types, astrocytes, and spiking dynamics. This is an example of the growing field of “NeuroAI”, at the interface between computational neuroscience and artificial intelligence (Zador et al 2023).
The project will have three phases:
The results of these simulation studies can be used to make predictions for neuroscience experiments, or inspire new principles for designing next-generation AI systems.
Application deadline 26th February 2024. To be eligible for funding, UK students should have a 1st or 2nd class BSc degree, international applicants should have a Masters degree. More info here: https://www.ulster.ac.uk/doctoralcollege/find-a-phd/1577672.
General openings
If you would like to do a PhD in the group, we have projects available on neural data science; computational modelling of synaptic plasticity, learning and memory; and synaptic and neural circuit dysfunction in autism. In each case we try to link bottom-up biology with top-down theoretical neuroscience or machine learning ideas. Most projects involve collaborations with experimentalists in UK, or Europe, or the US. Example directions we are working on:
UK PhDs take 3-4 years and usually start in September (although this is flexible). Please contact me to discuss funding options, which vary a lot depending on your country of origin. Usually you would need a good Bachelors or Masters degree in computer science, biology, physics, engineering or maths before taking on a computational neuroscience PhD - but other backgrounds are possible. However, the most important thing is not your background, but that you enjoy research work, are curious, and want to understand how the brain works. Our School’s application deadline will be early 2024, contact Cian in Nov/Dec 2023.
If you are a student on an Ulster University BSc or MSc degree programme in Computer Science/AI/Data Science, please contact me early in the academic year to discuss possible computational neuroscience projects. Projects can vary in their 1) level of computational/mathematical difficulty, 2) level of biological detail, and 3) whether they are more focused on computational modelling (simulating the brain) versus statistical data analysis/machine learning.