Postdoctoral Researcher, Spinal Mechanisms of Motor Control - Neural Activity

UHN is Canada’s #1 hospital and the world’s #1 publicly funded hospital. With 10 sites and more than 44,000 TeamUHN members, UHN consists of Toronto General Hospital, Toronto Western Hospital, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, The Michener Institute of Education and West Park Healthcare Centre. As Canada's top research hospital, the scope of biomedical research and complexity of cases at UHN have made it a national and international source for discovery, education and patient care. UHN has the largest hospital-based research program in Canada, with major research in neurosciences, cardiology, transplantation, oncology, surgical innovation, infectious diseases, genomic medicine and rehabilitation medicine. UHN is a research hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto.

UHN’s vision is to build A Healthier World and it’s only because of the talented and dedicated people who work here that we are continually bringing that vision closer to reality.

www.uhn.ca

Position Summary

In the Levine lab, we focus on the spinal cord as the final point of neural control over body movement. The spinal cord contains the motoneurons that drive our muscles, the immediate premotor neurons that are the primary regulators of motoneuron activity, and the broader, as-yet-undefined networks of spinal neurons that transform sensory and descending cues into purposeful behavior. We have built extensive atlases of spinal cord cell types and we now want to understand how they act cooperatively to orchestrate movement.

We are seeking a postdoctoral fellow to investigate whether, and how, cell types shape population activity and mediate specific elements of sensorimotor function. This work will bring together several powerful approaches recently developed and adapted in our lab including in vivo high density electrical recordings from the spinal cords of awake behaving mice, closed-loop optogenetics, spinal cell-type specific manipulation, quantitative behavioral tracking, and computational analysis of neural activity and behavior data (which could involve co-mentorship with an outside collaborator). There is significant opportunity to co-design and lead projects.

Duties