Assistant Professor in Predictive Brain Processes

Welcome to Maastricht University! How does the brain construct an adaptive interpretation of the world? How do sensory information, prior knowledge, expectations, goals and internal states interact to shape perception, learning and decision-making? At the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience of Maastricht University, we are looking for an Assistant Professor in Predictive Brain Processes who wants to develop an ambitious and independent research programme that advances our mechanistic understanding of how the brain anticipates, infers, learns and acts under uncertainty.

You will establish an independent and internationally visible research programme in predictive brain processes and contribute to the education programmes of the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience.

You will have the intellectual freedom to build an independent and internationally visible research programme in predictive and inferential brain processes. Your research may take an experimental, computational or theoretical approach. We are not committed to a single theoretical framework: we welcome research that develops, tests, compares, refines or challenges existing theories. Contributing to a deeper understanding of the computations and mechanisms underlying adaptive cognition, your research may focus on areas such as:

• Perception, learning and working memory
• Statistical and sequence learning
• Conscious experience
• Abstract and compositional representations
• Decision-making and sensorimotor control

You may work in any sensory modality, across multiple modalities or in modality-general domains, using approaches such as psychophysics, eye-tracking, neuroimaging, non-invasive electrophysiology and computational modelling. We are particularly interested in formal, computational, biologically inspired, generative or neural-network models that advance theories of brain function.

Alongside developing your research programme, you will:

• Develop collaborative research projects and pursue external research funding.
• Contribute to an open, supportive and inclusive research culture.
• Divide your time approximately 50/50 between research and teaching.

Teach within the interdisciplinary BSc Brain Science, particularly in areas related to your expertise, such as cognitive and computational neuroscience, perception and cognition, mathematics, programming, modelling, artificial intelligence and data analysis. Contribute to the FPN Psychology bachelor’s and master’s programmes and, occasionally, programmes outside FPN. Supervise bachelor’s and master’s theses. Contribute to administrative responsibilities or committee work once you are settled in your role.

• Have a PhD in (Cognitive) Psychology, (Computational) Neuroscience, Biomedical Sciences or Engineering, Artificial Intelligence or a related discipline.
• Have postdoctoral or equivalent research experience, with demonstrated research quality and a competitive publication record.
• Have strong theoretical, computational and/or experimental expertise relevant to the interplay between sensation and cognition and to predictive and inferential brain processes.
• Have demonstrated the ability, or clear potential, to acquire competitive research funding, individually or collaboratively.
• Have the potential to develop an independent and internationally visible research programme that complements and strengthens the department. We welcome research spanning behaviour and cognition, representations, algorithms, neural populations and circuits. Expertise in a particular sensory modality or research method is not required.
• Have relevant teaching experience and enthusiasm for further developing your teaching and thesis supervision.
• Are a…