The Institute for All Minds seeks a full-time, on-site Neuroscience Associate. You will work on two projects. The first is to experimentally investigate how the brain creates conscious experience. You will leverage a new mouse model of conscious visual perception to enable the identification of neural circuits that specifically cause the conscious aspect of seeing. 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, for the first time in human history, to answer.
The second project is to experimentally investigate a novel form of neurodegeneration. The principal goal of this program is to determine whether this form of neuronal death is the root cause of a currently untreatable neurodegenerative disease, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases and ALS.
Responsibilities:
(1) Train mice, using a semi-automated bespoke virtual reality system
(2) Conduct neurosurgery, installing headplates and stereotactically targeting injections into the mouse brain
(3) Perform brain histology, using antibodies to visualize neurons and other cells (immunohistochemistry)
(4) Analyze neuroimagery, quantifying the effects of injections on the brain with software assistance
(5) Following mastery of (1)-(4), train and manage a team of undergraduates to do (1)-(4)
(6) Care for the mouse colony, breeding specific transgenic and mutant lines and genotyping the progeny
(7) Support the development of novel behavioral assays to measure other aspects of conscious experience, including tactile and auditory perception, free will, emotions and valence experience
(8) Do whatever else is necessary for our small, scrappy research start-up to succeed!
Minimum Qualifications:
(A) Bachelor's degree in neuroscience, biology, cognitive science, psychology, or a related field
(B) At least 2 years of experimental neuroscience research experience
(C) Proficient with rodent stereotactic brain injections and brain histology
(D) Exquisite attention to detail
(E) A tolerance of the repetitive work normally involved in biology research
(F) Excellent work ethic and stamina
(G) A creative problem-solver that that thinks up solutions from many divergent angles
Ideal Qualifications:
(H) Extensive experience with mouse training in a head-fixed associative learning task
(I) Extensive experience with quantitative brain image analysis
(J) A deep curiosity about the mystery of consciousness
(K) An earnest desire to advance therapies for neurodegenerative diseases
(L) An intrinsic love for learning
About the Institute for All Minds:
We take a very broad approach to our problems and strongly favor exploration over hypothesis, which is optimal 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 administration, 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 fail, we ignore conventional thinking and 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 was trained in a Nobel prize-winning lab. He then completed a Neuroscience postdoc at UCSF and UC Berkeley as a Miller Fellow, where he developed a ground-breaking approach for studying conscious visual perception using mice (described in "Acute requirement for the hippocampus in putatively conscious vision revealed by a mouse model of blindsight", Current Biology, 2026). 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 near the BART subway station, making it easily accessible by public transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
Application Instructions
Please email [email protected] 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, please note that. Please include your overall undergrad GPA (not just in your major), relevant test scores, and any calculation of class rank on your resume / CV.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Job Type: Full-time
Benefits:
- Dental insurance
- Health insurance
- Paid time off
- Retirement plan
- Vision insurance
Application Question(s):
- Please remember that you must attach a cover letter describing why your skills and interests make you a good fit for this position. You can do this below or with an attachment at the end of the application. Candidates without a cover letter will not be reviewed. If the cover letter or resume is generated or modified by AI, please indicate that at the top. Thank you.
- Can you describe in more detail the stereotaxic surgeries you have completed? How many? Which brain areas? Do you have any experience injecting AAVs? If so, which AAVs?
- Can you describe in more detail your brain histology experience? How many brains have you processed? Which brain areas did you examine? If you conducted immunohistochemistry, which antibodies have you used? Did you do any quantifications, and if so, what did you measure and how?
- Do you have any experience with training mice in an associative learning paradigm? If so, was the mouse head-fixed or freely moving, and can you describe the paradigm in more detail?
Education:
Experience:
- stereotactic surgery: 1 year (Required)
- brain histology: 1 year (Required)
Work Location: In person
