The lab of Olivier Marre at the Vision Institute, Paris, is looking for several ERC-funded postdoctoral fellows to study how the retina processes natural scenes. We welcome applicants with diverse quantitative backgrounds, including, but not limited to neuroscience, mathematics, physics, and engineering. We are especially interested in applicants with good programming skills (Matlab, Python).
Our lab includes a mix of theoreticians and experimentalists, who work together on two research themes. First, we aim to understand how ganglion cells, the retinal output, extract relevant information from complex, natural scenes before it is sent to the rest of the brain. For this we use a combination of experiments (e.g. large-scale recordings with multi-electrode arrays) and modeling (based on machine learning and theoretical physics). Recently we have developed a perturbative approach to characterize how ganglion cells process natural scenes1. We want to expand this approach and develop novel strategies to understand the non-linear processing performed by ganglion cells.
Second, we aim to understand how these sensory models are implemented by the retinal circuit. To do this we have implemented an approach to systematically dissect out the mouse retinal circuit, combining optogenetics, two-photon holographic stimulation (see2 for more details) and electrophysiological recordings. Ongoing experiments involving optogenetics stimulation of specific types of amacrine cells are helping to understand how they shape ganglion cell responses.
The Vision Institute is located in the center of Paris and hosts 20 teams grouped in 5 departments (genetics, development, physiology, therapeutics and photonics) providing a broad range of expertise on vision and retina. It is a highly interdisciplinary environment and we have several on-going collaborations with experts in optics and gene therapy. Paris is a vibrant city with a large neuroscience community and a great scientific and cultural environment.
Candidates should send their CV and a brief cover letter describing their previous work and future goals, to Olivier Marre: olivier.marre@gmail.com Don’t hesitate to also contact me for more details.
Website: http://oliviermarre.free.fr/
1.- Goldin, MA; Lefebvre, B; Virgili, S; Pham Van Cang, MK; Ecker, A; Mora, T; Ferrari, U; Marre, O. Context-dependent selectivity to natural images in the retina. Nature Communications, in press. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.01.462157v1
2.- Spampinato G.L.B#, Ronzitti E.#, Zampini V., Ferrari U., Trapani F., Khabou H., Dalkara D., Picaud S., Papagiakoumou E., Marre O, Emiliani V* (2019). All-optical inter-layers functional connectivity investigation in mice retina. Cell report methods, in press.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/513192v1
