Lead Research Scientist, Functional Ultrasound Imaging

Astera Institute; California; On-site; USD 132,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Benefits package

Job summary

Astera Institute seeks a leading Research Scientist or Research Engineer to drive development of a volumetric functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) platform for awake, behaving primates. You will work across hardware, experiments, and large-scale data analysis with interdisciplinary teammates to advance mesoscale brain imaging.

The role emphasizes hands-on system design, data-driven discovery, and collaboration across engineering, neuroscience, and computation disciplines.

Qualifications

• PhD with 4-12+ years in neuroscience or related field; equivalent expertise considered.
• Experience with in vivo functional ultrasound imaging or comparable high-resolution neuroimaging.
• Experience designing neuroscience experiments in primates, including awake macaque fMRI.
• Strong programming skills in Python and/or MATLAB.
• Understanding of primate neuroanatomy, image registration, and atlas construction.
• Experience with image reconstruction and signal processing.
• Experience analyzing large-scale imaging/electrophysiology datasets, including ML methods.
• Ability to collaborate with software/hardware engineers and neuroscientists in a fast-paced environment.

Responsibilities

• Build and optimize a large-scale volumetric fUSI platform for awake, behaving primates.
• Design and run multimodal neuroscience experiments combining fUSI with behavioral paradigms.
• Develop robust pipelines for image reconstruction, preprocessing, and visualization.
• Analyze large-scale imaging datasets using modern statistics and ML approaches.
• Register data across sessions and animals to build brain atlases.
• Integrate fUSI with electrophysiology and other recording modalities.
• Collaborate with engineers to improve hardware and acquisition software.
• Mentor technicians and junior scientists; contribute to hiring and lab culture.
• Publish discoveries with Open Science and contribute to open datasets/docs.

Skills

Python

MATLAB

Neuroscience

Machine learning

Image processing

Data analysis

Mentorship

Education

PhD in neuroscience

Tools

fUSI hardware

Image reconstruction pipelines

Job description

Astera Institute seeks a leading Research Scientist or Research Engineer to drive development of a volumetric functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) platform for awake, behaving primates. You will work across hardware, experiments, and large-scale data analysis with interdisciplinary teammates to advance mesoscale brain imaging.

The role emphasizes hands-on system design, data-driven discovery, and collaboration across engineering, neuroscience, and computation disciplines.