TL;DR: If you liked our last NeurIPS paper https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.24.353409v1 and you think you can contribute and imagine, oh, the places we’ll go from here,...from one of the most loivable cities in the world, …

DO apply.

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We are looking for at least two scientists to join the vogelslab.org as postdocs at the @ISTAustria near Vienna.

The successful candidate will join an ongoing ERC funded project to discover families of spike-induced synaptic plasticity rules by way of numerical derivation.

Together, we will define and explore search spaces of biologically plausible plasticity rules expressed e.g., as polynomial expansions or multi layer perceptrons. We aim to compare the results to various experimental and theoretical data sets, including functional spiking network models, human stem-cell derived neural network cultures, in vitro and in vivo experimental data.

We are looking for someone who can expand and develop our multipurpose modular library dedicated to optimization of non-differentiable systems. Due to the modularity of the library, the candidate will have extensive freedom regarding which optimization techniques to use and what to learn in which systems, but being a team player will be a crucial skill.

Depending on your (flexible, possibly immediate) starting date we can offer up to 4-year contracts with competitive salaries, benefits, vacation time and ample budget for materials and travel in a tranquil and inspiring environment. The Vogelslab, and the IST Austria is located in Klosterneuburg, a historic city northwest of Vienna. The campus is located in the middle of the beautiful landscape of the Vienna Woods, 30 minutes from downtown Vienna, the capital of Austria that consistently scores in the top cities of the world for its high standard of living.

If you are interested, send an email with your application to Jessica . deAntonio [at] ist.ac.at.

Your application should include
your CV,
your most relevant publication,
contact information for 2 or more references, and
a cover letter with
- a short description of you & your career
- a brief discussion of what you think is the greatest weakness of the above mentioned NeurIPS paper (and maybe how you would go about fixing it).

We are looking to build a diverse and interesting environment, so if you bring any qualities that make our lab (and computational neuroscience at large) more diverse than it is right now, please consider applying.

We will begin to evaluate applications on the 31st of April and aim to get back to you with a decision within 5 weeks of your application.