Postdoc Employee-The Building Blocks of Cognition Laboratory - Psychology

The Department of Psychology at the University of California Berkeley invites applications for a Postdoctoral Scholar Employee, specifically in the area of cognitive neuroscience. The Building Blocks of Cognition Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, headed by Professor Silvia Bunge, studies the cognitive and neural processes that support reasoning, memory, and goal-directed behavior in humans.

The postdoctoral employee will work on a National Institute of Mental Health project titled "Narrowing the mechanistic gap for anterior prefrontal cortex function". This project targets the lateral aspect of anterior PFC, a brain region whose anatomy in humans is not clearly defined and whose fundamental role in cognition is poorly understood.

At a descriptive level, aLPFC is involved in higher-level cognitive abilities such as planning, multi-tasking, reasoning, memory retrieval monitoring, and decision-making. Seeking to investigate its function at a more granular level via fMRI, structural MRI, and diffusion-weighted imaging on the 3 Tesla and 7 Tesla scanners at the Brain Imaging Center at UC Berkeley.

Close collaborators on the project include Associate Professor Kevin Weiner (functional neuroanatomist), staff in the lab of Professor David Feinberg (MR physicist) at UC Berkeley, and collaborators at other sites. Specific duties include the following:

• Analyze fMRI data and integrate it with structural MRI and/or DTI data
• Take the lead on writing and revising manuscripts, and present results locally and at conferences.
• Provide mentorship to lab trainees.