PhD student – Traumatic Brain Injury

PhD project in Evgenia Salta's Neurogenesis & Neurodegeneration lab at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, run jointly with Carlos Fitzsimons's group at the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences, University of Amsterdam, and funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) Open Competition. The project asks how repetitive mild traumatic brain injury leads to long-term memory decline, focusing on lasting inflammatory and neurogenic changes in the human hippocampus involving microglia, astrocytes and immature neurons.

The candidate runs single-nucleus RNA sequencing pipelines on postmortem human brain from donors with a record of traumatic brain injury, handles sample collection and stratification, applies computational pipelines to identify cellular and molecular programmes, and establishes in vitro human cell models to test candidate targets. The appointment totals four years (one year first, extended after a positive evaluation) at €3,204–€4,051 gross per month (scale P).

Applications close on 1 December 2026.

A master's degree in biomedical sciences, neuroscience or similar; hands-on experience with coding, omics computational analyses and single-cell transcriptomics (prerequisites); iPSC cell culture experience is a plus; proficiency in spoken and written English. Send a detailed CV and a motivation letter covering past research, interests, earliest start date and at least two referees.