Research Scientist, All-Optical Investigation of Rodent Cognition

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 . Company Overview 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 We are seeking an experimental neuroscientist to join Astera Neuro's rodent neuroscience team and use all-optical methods to investigate how the brain builds and uses an internal model of the world. You will help define the cognitive processes and behavioral paradigms that make this question experimentally tractable in mice. You will use two-photon imaging and holographic photostimulation to read, write, and perturb neural activity at single-cell resolution, with the goal of predictably changing an animal's cognitive state and ultimately controlling the contents of its internal model. This is an end-to-end experimental role spanning task design, surgery, all-optical experimentation, and large-scale neural data analysis. What You'll Do Help define the cognitive processes and experimental questions we pursue in mice, and design and iterate head-fixed behavioral paradigms to probe them. Run two-photon imaging and holographic photostimulation experiments to read, write, and perturb specific neural activity patterns at single-cell resolution during behavior. Run holographic targeting, power calibration, and closed-loop stimulation on the all-optical rig, working with our optics engineering team. Lead computational analysis of large-scale neural population data, including dimensionality reduction, population decoding, GLMs, and circuit-level inference. Set the viral and transgenic expression strategy, including soma-targeted ChRmine and GCaMP. Perform mouse survival surgery: stereotaxic viral injection, chronic cranial-window implantation, and headbar installation. Mentor research associates and technicians and, at the senior or principal level, more junior scientists; contribute to hiring, onboarding, and lab culture. Contribute to publications, talks, open data and tooling releases, and engagement with the broader scientific community. Who You Are Required: PhD i