Opportunities

There are several opportunities to do research with us at the Integrative Biophysics group:

• Opportunity for a research stay for international postdocs or brazilian graduate students to work on a project " Animal vocal source localization using machine learning "  Details here in english and portuguese  
• Foraging tasks are emerging as crucial models for naturalistic decision-making in rodents. On a mechanistic level, those tasks give us the opportunity to understand how individual sensitivities to time and effort drive variability in the strategy of rodents facing an explore vs exploit dilemma. If those questions are of interest to you, there is an opening for a PhD position at the Centuri Turing Center for living systems in Marseille where the project is advised by David Robbe (INMED, Marseille), Eloy Christophe (IRPHE, Marseille) and Ahmed El Hady (CASCB, Konstanz). The project will combine theoretical and experimental approaches to understand how foraging strategies vary in terms of their sensitivities to time and effort during a variety of experimental conditions. We are looking for a candidate with a strong quantitative background, capable to developing numerical simulation/model (i.e. strong programming skills) and with a strong taste for animal behaviour and cognition. For more details and application procedure, please check the website: https://centuri-livingsystems.org/phd2024-19/
• University of Konstanz offers this unique independent postdoctoral fellowship Zukunftskolleg postdoctoral fellowhsip . If you are granted this fellowship, you can have a collaboration with us at the Integrative biophysics group.
• Postdoctoral fellowships such as the Human Frontier Science Program or the Marie Curie Fellowship: we are very happy to discuss potential fellowship proposals relating to theoretical biophysics of collectives (from cells to animals) that we can host in our group. Get in touch to discuss your ideas!

We are always open for collaborations, as the scientific process benefits greatly from interdisciplinarity. Currently looking for collaborators on the following projects (Get in touch if you would like to collaborate on any of those projects):

• Extending foraging theory to cellular physiology: cells perform decisions, process information and forage for resources in its local environment. Can one extend theoretical frameworks developed to understand social foraging in animals to the cellular context?
• Collective ion channel dynamics underlying action potentials: It is increasingly appreciated that ion channels do not work independently but rather interdependently, either coupling to each other or to the membrane surrounding them. Can one apply laws of collective behaviour and global ordering to clusters of ion channels? How does ion channel collectives shape the action potential from the nanoscale to the microscale?