Postdoctoral Scholar in the Biological Physics Theory Unit

The Stephens Unit is seeking a postdoctoral researcher with a strong theory/computation background to join our effort to understand organism-scale behavior from a physical perspective. Inspired by powerful frameworks in dynamical systems, statistical physics and information theory, we seek new organizing principles in posture-scale movement. We combine theory with novel high-resolution experiments created with collaboration partners, and work in diverse organisms, from ``simpler” animals such as C elegans and Drosophila larva, to interacting zebrafish, and even cephalopods such as squid. In all these examples, and unique among the multitude of biological signals, behavior is both experimentally accessible and remarkably low-dimensional. This is ideal terrain for theory! 

Work in our unit focuses on organism-scale movement in the form of changes in body posture, a scale both rich and underexplored. All animals, including humans, reveal important and subtle information about their internal dynamics in their outward configurations of body posture, whether these internal dynamics originate from gene expression, neural activity, or biomechanics and motor control strategies. Remarkable recent advances in machine vision afforded by deep convolutional neural networks, including those of our own group, enable precise posture estimation for an increasing variety of organisms and in naturalistic settings. While such progress is both energizing and encouraging, substantially less effort has been invested in the theoretical and computational ideas required to understand the resulting rich behavioral dynamics. But how do we quantify the emergent dynamics of entire organisms? What principles characterize living movement?. Learn more about what we do from our website, and from the "physics of behavior" episode of the OIST podcast series.