Campus Pride Jobs

Columbia University's Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute brings together world-class scientists across academic disciplines conducting pioneering research to transform our understanding of how the brain works - and gives rise to mind and behavior. The Institute fosters a collaborative and inclusive environment across 50 labs, advancing insights into human health by exploring how the brain develops, performs, endures, and recovers.

At the Zuckerman Institute, we are committed to becoming a more inclusive, equitable, and diverse place of scientific discovery and supporting a culture of respect. Promoting diversity in science will help drive the transformative science that can change the world.

Situated in the Jerome L. Greene Science Center on Columbia's Manhattanville campus, the state-of-the-art building offers an environment where the highest level of scholarly scientific research takes place on a daily basis, with the benefit of being located in the heart of New York, one of the world's most vibrant and culturally rich cities.

The International Brain Laboratory (https://www.internationalbrainlab.com/) is seeking a Staff Associate II/ research software engineer, who will play a key role in a large-scale international collaboration in brain research. The IBL combines the efforts of approximately 50 scientists in 20 laboratories toward understanding the brain-wide basis of a complex behavior. The project will involve recording the activity of millions of neurons in the working brain and building mathematical models of the resulting data. The data sets this project will produce are vast and complex, including physiological recordings, behavioral measurements, and video, all of which must be standardized into common formats, integrated into a single database, and subjected to quality control. This core position will support both experimental and theoretical work through the entire lifecycle of data, including acquisition, analysis, modeling, and dissemination.

The Staff Associate II/ research software engineer will work closely with our scientists to develop and deploy software and electronic hardware for experiment control, collection, storage, and data analysis. The experiments make use of complex control systems including video, audio, and fluidics, the data are processed by sophisticated algorithms including GPU-accelerated deep networks, and then transferred automatically to a central database. The successful candidate will interface with scientists in our member laboratories (located in London, Lisbon, Geneva, New York City, Long Island, Los Angeles, Princeton, and Seattle) and with the core software development team based in Lisbon, to support experiments and ensure data is of high quality.

The ideal candidate would have experience with Linux, Python, Arduino systems, electronics, team programming, quality assurance, web design, and system administration. A flexible attitude, the ability to quickly adapt to new situations and learn new systems, and to work independently as part of a geographically distributed team, are essential. Experience with scientific research, networking, parallel computing, or relational databases would also be desirable. As this is a distributed collaboration, the candidate will have a home base at one of our member laboratories but should be prepared to travel to all the partner sites.

Responsibilities

Main Duties:

To develop, deploy, maintain, and operate software and hardware to collect and analyze neurophysiology recordings at worldwide partner sites

To communicate around the software infrastructure and new applications achievable with them by producing materials such as documentation, tutorials, and courses

Professional Standards and Quality Assurance:

Ensuring the highest standard of record keeping, maintaining accurate, complete and up to date records.

Ensuring confidentiality is maintained as applicable.

* Attending and contributing to Departmental, Institutional, Working Group, and other meetings as appropriate.

• Acting at all times by the highest professional standards, and ensuring that these are maintained in the delivery of all aspects of research

Minimum Qualifications: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Neuroscience, or a related area.

Preferred: 2 years of experience in software development research computing