Prof. Jakob Macke

The Mackelab (Prof. Jakob Macke, University Tübingen) is looking for PhD, Postdoc and Scientific Programmer applicants interested in working with us on using deep learning to build, optimize and study mechanistic models of neural computations! In a first project, funded by the ERC Grant DeepCoMechTome, we want to make use of connectomic reconstructions of the fruit fly to build large-scale simulations of the fly brain that can explain visually driven behavior—see, e.g., our prior work with Srinivas Turaga’s group, described in Lappalainen et al., Nature, 2024. In a second project, funded by the DFG through the CRC Robust Vision, we want to use differentiable simulators of biophysical models (Deistler et al., 2024) to build data-driven models of visual processing in the retina. We are open to candidates who are more interested in neurobiological questions, as well as to ones more interested in machine learning aspects (e.g. training large-scale mechanistic neural networks, learning efficient emulators, coding frameworks for collaborative modelling, automated model discovery for mechanistic models, …) of these projects.