The Institute for All Minds seeks a full-time, on-site Staff Scientist to lead research on a novel form of neurodegeneration. The principal goal of this program is to determine whether this form of neuronal death contributes to one or more of the top currently untreatable neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases and ALS.
Responsibilities:
(1) Research strategy, developing and refining through extensive reading and thinking how best to investigate this novel form of neurodegeneration
(2) Mouse neurosurgery, inducing cell death using stereotactically targetted injections
(3) Brain histology, using antibodies to visualize neurons, other cell types, and relevant biological processes with immunohistochemistry
(4) Neuroimagery analysis, quantifying the effects of injections on the brain with software assistance
(5) Staff management, training and managing a small team of research technicians and undergraduates to do (2)-(4)
(6) Whatever else is necessary for our scrappy research start-up to succeed!
Minimum Qualifications:
(A) PhD in neuroscience, biology, cognitive science, psychology or a related experimental field
(B) Extensive experience with stereotactic surgery with mice, histology, immunohistochemistry, and image analysis
(C) Avid, broad reader of the scientific literature
(D) Deeply curious with a passion for learning
(E) Works quickly and with high quality, recognizing that with exploratory research, 80% of the results can be gotten with 20% of the effort, garnering 5x more productivity over perfection
(F) Highly flexible and adaptable and very responsive to feedback
Ideal Qualifications:
(G) Extensive experience with extracellular electrophysiology in awake behaving mice (e.g. Neuropixels)
(H) Thrives working independently with intermittant guidance
Compensation:
The Institute offers a competitive salary, paid time off, a retirement plan, medical insurance, as well as perks such as free meals, parking and 20% time to work on a project of your choice, as pioneered by Google.
About the Institute for All Minds:
We take a very broad approach to our problems and strongly favor exploration over hypothesis, especially in the early stages of a project. Most hypotheses are wrong, so we are better off screening and letting the right approaches surface. We believe scientists should focus on problems that matter and ensure that time and energy are well-spent, not bogged down by unnecessary overhead and bureaucracy. We try to use the simplest words available to explain what we are doing and why we are doing it. When traditional approaches have failed, we ignore conventional thinking and try to attack a problem from first principles using methods that are most likely to provide the right answer. For these reasons we have established an independent institute rather than pursuing this work within academia.
The Institute is a 501c3 non-profit public charity dedicated to understanding (1) how the brain causes conscious experience and (2) how neurons die during neurodegeneration.
The founder, Nikhil Bhatla, PhD, has focused on scientific approaches for studying conscious experience since 2007. He received his BS at Stanford University in Product Design (Mechanical Engineering and Art) and a minor in Computer Science. Following several years working at Google, he received a PhD in Neuroscience from MIT, where he worked in a Nobel prize-winning lab. He then completed a Neuroscience postdoc at UCSF and UC Berkeley as a Miller Fellow, where he developed an innovative approach for studying conscious visual perception using mice. In 2024, he started the Institute for All Minds to continue this work in an independent, fast-paced research organization.
The Institute is located in Downtown Berkeley very close to the BART subway station, making it easily accessible by public transit from throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
Application Instructions:
Please email work@iam.science describing why you are excited about this position and why it is a good fit for your interests and skills, with your resume / CV as an attachment. If your resume / CV or cover letter is generated or modified by AI, your application will NOT be considered.
We look forward to hearing from you.