Postdoc Position to Study the Neuromodulatory Organization of Brain Circuit Activity and Behavior

Benjamin White’s laboratory at the National Institute of Mental Health (Bethesda, Maryland, USA) would welcome a postdoctoral fellow interested in pursuing questions related to the neuromodulatory control of behavioral state.  We seek to broadly understand how neuromodulators act in concert to organize neural circuit activity and produce behavior. Additionally, we are interested in how neuromodulatory mechanisms of behavioral control change over development and evolution. Working in Drosophila, we use a variety of approaches to tackle these questions including brain-wide neuronal imaging by light-sheet microscopy, whole-body muscle activity imaging, computational modeling, single-cell RNA sequencing, and state-of-the-art circuit-mapping. Several circuit-mapping approaches used in Drosophila were developed in the lab including Split Gal, Trojan exons, and SpaRCLIN.

Our research focuses on the developmentally malleable and highly evolvable behaviors that govern insect molting and recent projects have been directed toward identifying neuromodulatory neurons that regulate behavioral transitions (Diao et al., 2017, eLife), comprehensively characterizing behavior at single-muscle resolution (Elliott et al., 2021, eLife), and deconstructing mechanisms underlying behavioral decision-making (Diao, 2020, BioRxiv). Opportunities exist to pursue research in these and other areas. Creative project ideas are not only welcome, but encouraged!  

Application:
Interested candidates should send a CV and a short summary of their research experience and future goals to benjaminwhite@mail.nih.gov