Human Neuroscientist, Intracranial Recording

About Astera Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better future. We believe the coming years will bring an era of unprecedented scientific and technological advancement as exponential progress in AI converges with central advances in other fields to accelerate innovation. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally rethink the institutions, systems, and tools that drive progress. We have committed a $3.5B endowment to that work and fit the form of our support to the function it serves: grants, investments, and in-house research programs. We accept meaningful risk in the research we back and expect some of it to fail because transformative ideas are rarely the ones already proven. Our projects, and the foundation itself, operate like high-velocity startups, with a high performance bar and competitive compensation to match. We are searching for leaders who are compelled by the challenge of driving high-impact change in the way science is funded, conducted, and communicated. You can read more about our mission, vision, and programming at astera.org/vision . About Astera Neuro Astera Neuro seeks to understand and engineer consciousness. We believe consciousness is the process by which the brain builds a coherent internal model of the world and the self. We aim to understand this model and to develop the technologies to write experience directly into the brain. By combining large-scale neural recording, causal perturbation, and brain-based AI, we seek to move neuroscience from observing correlates of experience to engineering it. The same tools carry direct therapeutic promise for neurological and psychiatric diseases that alter perception, thought, and sense of self. Because the science and tools required do not yet exist, we are assembling a founding team of neuroscientists, theorists, and engineers to create them. We do high-risk, high-reward science in a well-resourced, collaborative environment with competitive pay, and share everything openly under Astera's Open Science Policy. Position Summary Astera Neuro is setting up a human neuroscience initiative to collect, process, and analyze intracranial data at scale. We are hiring human neuroscientists to lead this program, conducting large-scale studies of the compositional representations underlying language, mathematics, perception, and working memory in neurosurgical patients at the single-neuron level, in close collaboration with partner sites around the world. This role is the human-side complement to Astera Neuro’s primate program. You will design and implement intracranial cognitive tasks suitable for wide deployment, translate primate paradigms into compatible human studies, analyze single-neuron and population recordings from the human brain, and coordinate with clinical collaborators across the world. The work runs end-to-end from conception, paradigm design, data acquisition, and pre-processing, through analysis, publication, and curated open-science data releases. It depends on strong scientific judgment, deep knowledge of the literature, careful experimental discipline, a sense for what is feasible in the human space, and genuine collaboration with outside teams. We are hiring at multiple levels for this role. At the Scientist level, you will lead well-defined studies with regular guidance. At the Senior Scientist level, you will own research lines end-to-end and manage clinical partnerships. At the Principal Scientist level, you will define the human research roadmap, mentor scientists, and shape how Astera’s animal and human programs fit together. We will calibrate scope and title based on your experience. What You’ll Do Design, implement, and deploy intracranial cognitive paradigms covering language, syntax, semantic learning, mathematical reasoning, perception, and working memory. Translate primate paradigms into compatible human studies, in close coordination with experimental and co