Research Fellow

Job Purpose

The successful candidate will work on a 5-year ERC starting grant (lab of Dr. Joseph Galea) entitled “Motivating motor learning; the role of reward, punishment and dopamine.” This grant will build upon recent work from the lab that has shown reward and punishment-based feedback to have dissociable effects on motor learning. Using a combination of behavioural analysis, genetics, pharmacology and modelling techniques this project will provide the first in-depth behavioural and neural account of the role of motivation (reward/punishment) in motor learning. Based on this work, novel motor learning-based interventions will be developed for stroke patients suffering long-term motor impairments. This project will eventually involve a team of 3 postdoctoral researchers and 2 PhD students.

We are advertising for the 2nd of these postdoctoral researchers, which is a 3-year position (in the first instance) starting on 1st October, 2016. We are looking to appoint a highly motivated candidate whose main role will be to develop a set of motor learning tasks (model-based/ reinforcement/ use-dependent) that will be used to examine the role of motivation. The postholder will be responsible for the programming of these tasks for a KINARM robot (using Simulink/graphical programming in Matlab), testing them in a large cohort of healthy volunteers and for the analysis of the behavioural data (kinematic/computational models). On the basis of this work, the postdoctoral researcher will also be required to generate publications and present at international conferences.

Person Specification

• PhD in Psychology, Physiology, Neuroscience, Engineering, Physics or Maths.
• Research experience in human motor control/learning. This would include experience in the collection (participant recruitment/testing) and analysis (behavioural/computational/statistical) of behavioural data.
• Strong background in programming motor-based behavioural tasks. The ideal candidate would have experience in programming motor tasks for a KINARM robot using Simulink (graphical programming in Matlab). However, experience with other robotic devices and programming language (C++) is also sufficient.
• Experience in analysing behavioural data using Matlab.
• Good academic writing and presentation skills; ideally academic publication record.