The mission of the Allen Institute is to unlock the complexities of bioscience and advance our knowledge to improve human health. Using an open science, multi-scale, team-oriented approach, the Allen Institute focuses on accelerating foundational research, developing standards and models, and cultivating new ideas to make a broad, transformational impact on science.
The MindScope program seeks to understand the transformations, sometimes called computations, in coding and decoding that lead from photons to behavior and conscious experience by observing, perturbing, and modeling the physical transformations of signals in the cortical-thalamic visual system within a few perception-action cycles.
Understanding how the structure of biological neuronal networks leads to its observed activity, and how it relates to the implemented computations is one of the primary challenges in computational neuroscience. We have large datasets of in-vitro measured cell type properties (https://celltypes.brain-map.org/), statistical knowledge of their connections (https://portal.brain-map.org/explore/connectivity/synaptic-physiology) and large-scale recordings of their in-vivo activity (https://observatory.brain-map.org/visualcoding). These are complemented by a fantastic dataset of coupled structure-activity measurement at cell type level in one tissue (https://microns-explorer.org).
We are seeking a scientist to join the Modeling and Theory team of Stefan Mihalas help understand the computational properties of cortical microcircuits by helping construct models relating structure to activity, integrating such models in larger models of cortical computations, and systematically analyze the computational output by perturbing the microcircuit model.