Spatial Navigation

Sam Neymotin

Postdoctoral scientist positions are available at the Nathan Kline Institute (NKI) for Psychiatric Research to work on computational neuroscience research funded by recently awarded NIH and DoD grants. Our NIH-funded projects investigate the brain's dynamic circuit motifs underlying internal vs. external-oriented processes in the auditory and interconnected areas, using circuit modeling of the thalamocortical system. In this project, the postdoc will build data-driven biophysical models constrained by data collected from electrophysiology labs at NKI and Columbia & The Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, and then use the models to predict optimal neuromodulation strategies for inducing/suppressing circuit patterns, testable in vivo. Our DoD project involves developing computational models of the hippocampal and entorhinal cortex circuitry used in spatial navigation, higher level decision making circuits, and integrating the models with agents learning to solve navigation tasks using neurobiologically-inspired learning rules. This project includes mathematicians and robotics researchers at UTK and CMU.