PhD Position - Multi-Scale Comparisons of Patterns of Concerted Activity and Causality in Cortical Neural Activity

Shape the future of data-driven neuroscience. Join the Helmholtz School for Data Science in Life, Earth and Energy (HDS-LEE) as a PhD candidate and work on an ambitious interdisciplinary project at the interface of data science, computational neuroscience and causal AI. You will collaborate with internationally recognized researchers and contribute to developing novel methods for understanding brain dynamics. The current opening for a PhD position is anchored at the Institute for Advanced Simulation - Computational and Systems Neuroscience (IAS-6) of Forschungszentrum Jülich, which consists of seven working groups that conduct research in the field of computational and systems neuroscience. The Statistical Neuroscience group headed by Prof. Sonja Grün develops computational methods to analyze the joint activity of neuronal networks, and applies these methods to experimental data in the context of international collaborations. Dr. Michael Denker, team leader at IAS-6, studies the relationship between the microscopic activity of individual neurons and mesoscopic population signals. His team develops open software for analysis and data management that forms the technical basis of the proposed project. The PhD candidate will be co-supervised by Prof. Adèle Helena Ribeiro, head of the Institute for Causal and Explainable AI in Life Sciences, RWTH Aachen University. Her group develops state-of-the-art methods in causal discovery and inference, with an emphasis on robustness, scalability, uncertainty quantification, expert knowledge integration, and multi-scale causal abstraction and representation learning.