Description:
The successful candidate will be a member of NYU Abu Dhabi Core Technology Platforms (CTP) Operations reporting to the Executive Director of the CTP department. The existing MEG system was custom-built by the Kanazawa Institute of Technology (KIT, Tokyo, Japan) as part of a collaboration with its Applied Electronics Laboratory, and the scientist will coordinate with the manufacturer to ensure proper maintenance, continuous operation, and occasional upgrading of this system. The scientist will oversee the daily operations of the MEG facility to support faculty and researchers in conducting their research and will support the integration of MEG with other neuroimaging modalities (e.g., EEG and MRI) and research technologies (e.g., eye-tracking).
The Candidate
- Work with the MEG manufacturer to ensure the proper maintenance and continuous operation of the MEG system (including repairs and necessary or desirable upgrades)
- Work with faculty and associated researchers to identify, procure, install and maintain the ancillary equipment/infrastructure necessary to satisfy the research goals of the community served by the MEG facility
- Assist faculty and associated researchers in (i) setting up, (ii) running and (iii) analyzing MEG experiments, uni- or multi-modally (e.g., EEG, eye-tracking), in sensor or source-localized spaces
- Work with faculty and researchers on developing, implementing, evaluating and applying novel MEG/EEG recordings and analysis techniques
- Work with different groups of researchers in diverse disciplines such as psychology, engineering, social sciences and their collaborators at other local research institutions (e.g., hospitals, universities) and provide them with scientific and technical support.
Duties Will Include
- Managing inventory and purchasing of supplies necessary for the day-to-day operation of the MEG facility
- Optimizing/streamlining the existing research infrastructure to ensure the best possible data acquisition conditions (e.g., reducing/eliminating event-trigger delays, working with campus security and janitorial teams to avoid artifacts/noise due to the operation of electronic equipment near the MEG facility during data acquisition, etc.)
- Providing data and process quality control (daily/weekly) to maintain the integrity of the experimental data, including the creation/support of computational infrastructure to store, backup, preprocess and distribute data to the various research groups on campus
- Creating and/or supporting the development of automated data preprocessing pipelines (e.g., denoising, co-registration of head shape information with structural MRI scans or EEG sensors, etc.) to increase productivity and reproducibility of research
- Participation in building local research capacity by training students, postdocs, and new researchers to (i) collect MEG/EEG data at our MEG facility, and (ii) import data and perform basic analysis in available software packages such as MNE Python and/or Matlab-based toolboxes such as Fieldtrip.
- Consult with researchers to select appropriate tools and methods for data analysis, including modern statistical techniques for multiple-comparisons correction, denoising, multivariate analyses, functional connectivity analyses, and surface-based analyses.
- Organize training workshops and seminars to expose researchers to new developments in imaging methods and analysis techniques