Research Scientist, Data Analysis in San Francisco, California at Convergent Research
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Job Description
(formerly Forest Neurotech)
Arbor is a nonprofit research organization working on one of the hardest open problems in clinical neuroscience: how to change brain circuits by design.
Millions of people with depression, chronic pain, and other brain disorders have no treatment that works. Modulating activity in the brain circuits underlying their symptoms – with electrical stimulation, focused ultrasound, or magnetic stimulation – can work spectacularly well. But it doesn't work reliably, and we can't predict who it will help.
That's what Arbor aims to fix. The starting point is a new class of experiment: intervene, measure how the circuit responds, track the symptom, and repeat in the same individual over months. We’re building the necessary experimental platform. It currently includes the Forest 1 ultrasound system, which works like a wearable functional MRI, but with higher resolution. The system images activity across large brain volumes, including deep brain structures, and will soon stimulate as well. We are also adding electrode-based interfaces in animal studies. From these data, we'll build models to make neuromodulation predictable.
Arbor is a Focused Research Organization within the Convergent Research family, and the new name for Forest Neurotech. We're a mission-focused nonprofit, doing multidisciplinary translational work that doesn't fit in a lab or on a company roadmap. We have the funding to run the first phase, and we're a small team – the people we hire now will shape what Arbor becomes.
This is the person who turns our experiments into results.
Arbor is generating novel datasets. In humans, we image deep brain structures with functional ultrasound, and we will soon be adding ultrasound neuromodulation. Those studies are longitudinal and causal: intervene, image the circuit response, track the symptom, and repeat in the same person over months. In animals, we combine this bidirectional ultrasound with electrophysiological stimulation and recording, giving us causal measurements across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, in the same subjects over time.
Your primary responsibility is the analysis of those data and the tooling around them, working with a highly quantitative experimental team from the design stage onward. Because these studies will be longitudinal and closed-loop, there will also be a need for optimal experiment design, online analysis implementations, and closed-loop control.
We're hiring at multiple levels and will calibrate scope and title to your experience: at the earlier end, you'd own the analysis work in close collaboration with the scientific team; with more experience, you'd set the computational direction for the organization.
We're also still a small, startup-like organization, so everyone fills multiple roles, including hands-on science and the work that gets science done.
Own analysis of Arbor's experimental data, including functional ultrasound imaging and electrophysiology, along with the tooling that supports it
Work with the experimental team from study design through interpretation, so we answer the highest-priority questions
Develop image processing tools: registration and alignment, artifact handling, and whatever else the data demands
Help design algorithms for intervention optimization and adaptive experiment design
Develop online and real-time analysis methods to support closed-loop experiments
Build methods for integrating data across modalities and scales
Contribute to high-level scientific decisions about where the organization is going
Not all of this is one person's job. Where you start depends on your strengths and on what the program needs most.
The successful candidate will have:
A strong quantitative background: a PhD, or comparable training in an equally demanding environment such as industry
Real depth in several of: signal processing, statistics and inference, machine learning, medical or brain imaging analysis, control theory, computational neuroscience; we don't expect all of them
Strong coding skills
A significant body of independent work you can point to
The judgment to tell a problem that can be solved with standard statistical methods from one that requires a more sophisticated approach – and the discipline to prefer the simpler answer
A self-starter with the skills and instinct to find the shortest effective path to the scientific goal, rather than the most interesting one
Directness without friction – you say what you think, ask when you don't know, and aren't looking to compete with your colleagues
Nice to have: experience in a professional software development environment; a public record of algorithm or code development on GitHub or similar; experience with ultrasound, neural, or medical imaging data; prior work in a research setting where you had to build the tooling yourself.
You don't need a neuroscience background. You do need to want one. Some of the best people to have worked on these problems originally came from another field.
Our benefits include:
Medical, dental, and vision – most plans fully covered for you and your dependents
401(k) with up to 6% match
Company-paid life and AD&D, with voluntary supplemental options
15 holidays plus a floating day for your birthday
3 weeks PTO increasing with tenure, and separate sick leave
Arbor will consider sponsorship for U.S. work authorization case by case. Sponsorship isn't guaranteed, and immigration timelines can affect start dates. Where we sponsor, we cover the legal and government fees.
Arbor is an equal opportunity employer. We hire based on talent and experience and don't discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.
$183,000 - $210,000 a year