The Inria Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique Centre is one of Inria's eight centres and has more than thirty research teams. The Inria Center is a major and recognized player in the field of digital sciences. It is at the heart of a rich R&D and innovation ecosystem: highly innovative PMEs, large industrial groups, competitiveness clusters, research and higher education players, laboratories of excellence, technological research institute, etc

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral research fellow position with Dr. Camille Maumet in the Empenn team at INRIA. This position is part of the exploratory action GRASP “Generalizing Results Across Scientific Pipelines”.

Data processing is central to modern statistical analysis and with the development of data-intensive fields the different tools and approaches available to study a dataset have multiplied. Those tools are very valuable to practitioners and have brought the capacity to process more data in a shorter amount of time. But – each pipeline providing its own version of the results – pipeline multiplicity also leads to a very large space of possible results and practitioners often have little guidance to decide which answer they should choose. Despite recent advances in developing so-called ‘multiverse analyses’ -- in which results of a variety of pipelines are combined together to obtain a consensus -- these approaches in neuroimaging are still very time-consuming which makes them impractical in a lot of cases. The successful applicant will develop approaches in data science or in statistics to combine neuroimaging statistical maps (task-based fMRI) in order to provide multiverse analyses that are both correct and practical. To run their research, the successful applicant will be involved both in the implementation of existing pipelines to provide a benchmark for their analyses as well as in deriving the statistical approaches for neuroimaging multiverse analyses. The postdoctoral research fellow will work closely with Dr. Camille Maumet and in collaboration with Prof. Thomas Nichols from the University of Oxford. 

We are looking for excellent researchers with a strong background in data processing and analysis of neuroimaging data, ideally in task-based fMRI. The successful candidate must have very strong programming skills as well as enthusiasm to study brain imaging pipelines. Previous experience in (one of the many facets of) open science will be highly valued.

The fellow will join the Empenn team at INRIA Rennes, a group of circa 30 people working on neuroimaging applications and methods with a diverse set of expertise ranging from computer science and maths to medicine. The Empenn team is part of INRIA Rennes, a research centre of about 800 members focusing on all aspects of computer science research.

Applicants should have a strong background in data science, computer science or statistics, as well as experience working with neuroimaging data. More experienced applicants should also have demonstrated interest to work collaboratively and/or openly in their research.

Responsibilities

• Select and download appropriate open fMRI datasets (e.g. NARPS and HCP)
• Process fMRI data using a variety of neuroimaging analysis software packages (SPM, FSL, AFNI, nipype)
• Develop statistical or data science approaches for practical neuroimaging multiverse analyses
• Implement the proposed methods as tools for the neuroimaging community, interfacing with existing software packages
• Develop the documentation for these tools
• Re-implement existing neuroimaging pipelines and share those implementation openly as a resource for the scientific community
• Publish research in leading neuroinformatics, neuroimaging journals and/or present at a major conference

Essential requirements

• PhD in computer science, statistics or any field related to data science
• Prior experience with processing of neuroimaging data
• Very strong programming and software engineering skills (including ability to use version control)
• Experience in programming in Python
• Track record of high-quality reviewed journal publications  
• Well-organised with project-management skills
• Strong written and oral communications skills in English
• Ability to work well in a team and exchange and share ideas with other members

Desirable

• Priori experience working with nipype or Pydra to develop neuroimaging processing pipelines
• Prior open sharing of different research artefacts (code, data, methods, etc.)
• Participation in collaborative research projects, e.g. at Brainhack events
• Active in the open science community

For more information

Informal inquiries can be sent to Dr. Camille Maumet (camille.maumet@inria.fr). 

General information on INRIA and on the Empenn team are available on the respective websites: https://www.inria.fr/fr https://team.inria.fr/empenn/ 

Salary will be commensurate with experience as of the INRIA salary grids.

• Subsidized meals
• Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
• Possibility of teleworking (90 days per year) and flexible organization of working hours
• Partial payment of insurance costs

Monthly gross salary amounting to 2 653 euros