Postdoctoral Scholar - Neuroscience and Experimental Therapeutics (GLP-1R agonists and drug seeking)

The Grigson lab at Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey seeks a postdoc for several NIH-funded projects on how FDA-approved GLP-1 receptor agonists influence drug seeking and reinstatement in rodents. A new NIH R01 aims to determine who becomes vulnerable to substance use disorders, when and why, using the aversive behavioural and neurochemical response to intraoral delivery of a drug-paired taste cue (conditioned withdrawal) to track the development of addiction in vulnerable male and female rats.

It tests whether engaging homeostatic need substrates, as well as reward substrates, drives the transition from liking and wanting a drug to needing it. Techniques include intraoral catheter delivery, video monitoring of facial responses, operant conditioning, telemetry of muscle activation and in vivo fiber photometry.

PhD-level systems neuroscientist, ideally with expertise in deep-learning-based animal behaviour tracking linked causally to neural circuits; circuit manipulation (optogenetics, chemogenetics) or recording (fiber photometry) experience highly desirable; programming (MATLAB, Python) and neuroinformatics a plus.