The Department of Cognitive Neurobiology led by Caspar M. Schwiedrzik is seeking an outstanding postdoctoral researcher to establish and lead a new research program using Neuropixels recordings in behaving mice to study predictive processing at the interface of vision, space, and navigation. We will investigate how the brain learns regularities in structured environments and uses them to generate predictions about upcoming events. The successful candidate will develop experiments in which mice navigate controlled environments while encountering visual objects or events with learnable statistical structure. The goal is to understand how neural populations represent expectations, prediction errors, and the interaction between visual and spatial information during navigation. This new research program will be part of the lab’s broader cross-species research program on predictive processing and experience-dependent plasticity. Related experiments are conducted in the lab in non-human primates and humans, using electrophysiology, fMRI, (intracranial) EEG, and behavioral approaches. The position therefore offers the opportunity to develop mechanistic experiments in rodents while contributing to an integrated research program within the lab across species, methods, and spatial scales.
The lab seeks to understand the cortical basis and computational principles of perception and experience-dependent plasticity in the brain. See https://doi.org/10.64898/2025.11.30.691163, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-51543-y, and https://doi.org/10.64898/2025.12.17.694881 for recent examples of our work. The postdoc will play a key role in expanding these efforts toward high-density electrophysiology in behaving mice. Experiments will take place at the new research building THINK – Center for Theoretical and Integrative Neuroscience and Cognitive Science at Ruhr University Bochum (https://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/think/index.html.en). THINK provides a highly interdisciplinary environment for integrative neuroscience and cognitive science, with dedicated infrastructure for human and animal research, neuroimaging, behavioral experimentation, data analysis, and high-performance computing. The postdoc will join a growing team in the lab, including researchers working on electrophysiology, fMRI, and behavior in mice. The position is funded through the Research Center One Health Ruhr of the University Alliance Ruhr. One Health Ruhr brings together researchers from neuroscience, molecular biology, water research, cancer research, and related fields to study fundamental mechanisms of health and disease across biological and environmental scales.
