Dr Simon Little (https://littlelab.ucsf.edu/) is seeking a talented postdoctoral student to study the neurophysiology of motivation and non motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease using sensing-enabled, deep brain stimulator pacemakers towards automated optimization of adaptive, personalized, brain stimulation. 

Dr Little and his lab (plus collaborators including Phil Starr) have pioneered adaptive deep brain stimulation and chronic neural sensing for movement disorders and are now working at the forefront of studies to develop personalized stimulation therapies for patients. This includes research to understand the link between cortico-basal network physiology and fundamental behavior, physiological biomarker discovery and testing of closed-loop stimulation strategies for neurological patients.

The lab presents here an exciting opportunity to work with next generation technology that can continously record and stream intracranial cortical and basal ganglia physiology remotely from patients, in their homes, over multiple days. This will enable longitudinal, remote, recordings from patients in the naturalistic environment to investigate the relationship between neural signals motivation and sleep. The project will use remote experimental behavioral paradigms and wearable tracking techology to measure clinical state of patients in their naturalistic environment. This will be paired with chronic recordings from the basal ganglia in patients homes. Cognitive neuroscience, signals analysis, statistical methods will be particularly useful.