Staff Scientist - Consciousness

The Institute for All Minds seeks a full-time, on-site Staff Scientist to experimentally investigate how the brain creates conscious experience. You will begin by leveraging a new mouse model of conscious visual perception to identify the neural circuits that separately and specifically cause the conscious and unconscious aspects of seeing. You will also be responsible for the development of new assays to understand other kinds of conscious experiences, such as tactile and auditory perception, free will and emotions. Your work will get us closer to understanding how the brain causes conscious experience, an ancient philosophical question that underlies the core of human existence, one that we are now poised to answer.

Responsibilities:

(1) Develop the research strategy by extensively reading and thinking of how to best investigate different kinds of conscious experiences using the mouse, possibly including visual, tactile, and auditory perception, free will, and emotions

(2) Design and build bespoke devices and behavioral apparatuses to investigate different conscious experiences

(3) Train mice using these apparatuses as needed

(4) Conduct surgery, implanting devices on the mouse and stereotactically targeting injections into the mouse brain

(5) Confirm neural manipulations using brain and other organ histology and immunohistochemistry

(6) Record and analyze histological imagery, including quantification

(7) Train and manage a team of undergraduates on (3)-(6) to increase the throughput of discovery

(8) Do whatever else is necessary for our scrappy research start-up to succeed!

Minimum Qualifications: If you have all of the following, your application will receive serious consideration.

(A) PhD in Neuroscience, Biology, Cognitive Science, Psychology or other relevant experimental field

(B) Extensive experience with animal behavior and surgical and technical procedures, including measurement of physiology and behavior. The experience need not be with mice.

(C) A deep desire for meaning and purpose in life that only studying how the brain causes consciousness can fulfill

(D) Capacity for two-speed productivity:

(1) In the early stages of a project, working quickly and with reasonable quality, recognizing that with exploratory research, 80% of the results can be gotten with 20% of the effort

(2) In the later stages of a project, working slowly, carefully, and methodically with exceptional quality

(E) Creative problem-solving and loves to think up solutions from many different angles

Ideal Qualifications: If you have all of the following, your application will likely result in an interview.

F) Extensive experience with training mice in behavioral assays

(G) Extensive experience with stereotactic surgery and device installation on mice

(H) Extensive experience with brain histology, immunohistochemistry, and image analysis

(I) Extensive experience with extracellular physiology in behaving mice (e.g. Neuropixels)

(J) Adept at engineering, including electrical, mechanical, and software, as well as manufacturing methods, such as 3D printing

(K) Highly flexible and adaptable and very responsive to feedback. Always thinking of whether there is an alternative approach that would be more efficient and effective at reaching the goal.

(L) Avid, broad reader of the scientific literature. When you go to the beach, you bring a journal.

(M) Thrives when 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 (publication forthcoming). 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.