PhD position Neuroscience

Understanding how patterns of neural activity give rise to behavior is a central challenge in neuroscience. Most of what we know about this relationship comes from rodent experiments performed under tightly controlled laboratory conditions. While these approaches are essential for identifying neural mechanisms, they capture only a fraction of the behavioral repertoire animals display in more complex environments.

What are you going to do?

In this project, you will investigate how neural population activity relates to behavior across environments ranging from standardized laboratory assays to large outdoor enclosures. Using miniaturized calcium imaging, you will record the activity of large populations of neurons in freely behaving mice and determine how neural activity relates to moment-to-moment behavioral changes.

A major component of the project will make use of large outdoor mouse enclosures at the University of Groningen. These environments allow mice to express a rich repertoire of species-typical behaviors, including exploration, shelter use, social interactions and responses to changing environmental conditions. You will combine RFID tracking, multi-camera recordings and deep-learning-based behavioral analysis to identify reproducible behavioral states and understand how they vary across individuals, sexes and environmental contexts.

Pharmacological manipulations will be used to experimentally validate specific behavioral states and investigate how they are modulated by neural systems involved in anxiety and behavioral adaptation. You will subsequently combine wireless miniature calcium imaging with automated behavioral monitoring to uncover the neural dynamics associated with these behaviors.

Methods: miniature calcium imaging, deep-learning-based behavioral tracking, RFID tracking, computational analysis of neural population activity, stereotaxic surgery, pharmacological manipulations and histology.