Research Scientist​/Engineer, Functional Ultrasound Imaging

Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better future. We believe the coming years will bring an era of unprecedented scientific and technological advancement as exponential progress in AI converges with central advances in other fields to accelerate innovation. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally rethink the institutions, systems, and tools that drive progress.

We have committed a $3.5B endowment to that work and fit the form of our support to the function it serves: grants, investments, and in-house research programs. We accept meaningful risk in the research we back and expect some of it to fail because transformative ideas are rarely the ones already proven. Our projects, and the foundation itself, operate like high-velocity startups, with a high performance bar and competitive compensation to match.

We are searching for leaders who are compelled by the challenge of driving high-impact change in the way science is funded, conducted, and communicated. You can read more about our mission, vision, and programming /vision.

Astera Neuro seeks to understand and engineer consciousness. We believe consciousness is the process by which the brain builds a coherent internal model of the world and the self. We aim to understand this model and to develop the technologies to write experience directly into the brain. By combining large-scale neural recording, causal perturbation, and brain-based AI, we seek to move neuroscience from observing correlates of experience to engineering it.

The same tools carry direct therapeutic promise for neurological and psychiatric diseases that alter perception, thought, and sense of self. Because the science and tools required do not yet exist, we are assembling a founding team of neuroscientists, theorists, and engineers to create them. We do high-risk, high-reward science in a well-resourced, collaborative environment with competitive pay, and share everything openly under Astera's Open Science Policy.

You will develop Astera Neuro's volumetric fUSI platform for primates, working across hardware, experimentation, and computational analysis. From implementing the imaging system and designing experiments to analyzing large-scale datasets and building functional brain atlases, you'll help create one of the world's most advanced platforms for mesoscale imaging of the primate brain. You'll work alongside engineers, software developers, neuroscientists, veterinarians, and external collaborators in an interdisciplinary team focused on creating technologies that enable fundamentally new neuroscience.

Animal wellbeing is foundational to this work, supported by dedicated veterinary and behavioral care staff and rigorous welfare standards.

• Build, validate, and optimize a large-scale volumetric functional ultrasound imaging platform for awake, behaving primates.
• Design and execute multimodal neuroscience experiments combining fUSI with behavioral paradigms and complementary recording and perturbation techniques.
• Develop robust computational pipelines for image reconstruction, preprocessing, registration, quality control, statistical analysis, and visualization.
• Analyze large-scale functional imaging datasets using modern statistical and machine learning approaches.
• Register imaging data across sessions and animals to generate high-resolution anatomical and functional brain atlases.
• Integrate fUSI with electrophysiology and other neural recording and perturbation modalities to create comprehensive maps of brain function.
• Collaborate closely with engineers and software developers to continuously improve imaging hardware and acquisition software.
• Mentor research technicians, and at the senior or principal level, more junior scientists and engineers; contribute to hiring, onboarding, and lab culture.
• Publish scientific discoveries using Open Science and FAIR principles, and contribute to open datasets, software, and technical documentation.

• PhD with 4-12+ years of experience in neuroscience, bioengineering, physics, electrical engineering, or a related field is preferred. Equivalent demonstrated expertise will also be considered.
• Experience with in vivo functional ultrasound imaging, or with comparable high-resolution neuro imaging technologies.
• Experience designing and executing neuroscience experiments in primates, including awake macaque fMRI.
• Strong…