"Research Engineer - Research Computing (Research Professional 2)"

Job Details

Posted: 13-Aug-25

Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota

Categories: Research Support - Laboratory/Non-Laboratory, Staff/Administrative

Internal Number: 369733

Job Description

The Translational Neural Engineering Laboratory in the University of Minnesota Department of Psychiatry is seeking a Research Engineer interested in working at the intersection of technology, neuroscience, and mental health. Our laboratory develops technologies for changing activity in distributed brain networks involved in severe mental illnesses such as PTSD, major depression, addiction, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Some of them are in pilot clinical trials or being prepared to enter those trials. To understand our target circuits and prove that we can change them, we record electrical brain signals and deliver targeted stimulation in both model animal systems and human volunteers, across a range of techniques (both invasive and non-invasive). Much of our work borrows ideas from brain-computer interface/neural prosthetic technologies.

This posting is for a support/cross project role. You will work in collaboration with the lab’s experimentalists to develop, maintain, and extend pipelines for data analysis. The goal of these pipelines is to fuse signals from video, physical sensing (e.g., beam breaks and switches), and direct electrical brain recordings to understand the biological basis of mental illness. Concepts from modern machine learning and predictive modeling are woven throughout, in both supervised and unsupervised paradigms. Almost all of our analyses involve frequency-domain (Fourier/wavelet and related transform) analysis. The current codebase is a mixture of Python, R, and MATLAB, with an increasing emphasis on the first two and on the use of open-source/reusable toolkits. We work with data in a wide range of formats, and the design of scripts/tools to flexibly ingest and merge data across those formats is another central part of the work.

Job Responsibilities/Duties:

• 50% analytic code development and testing in Python, R, and/or MATLAB. This includes development of publication-quality figures, reports, and insights from the underlying analysis.
• 30% interaction with laboratory team members and external stakeholders to identify requirements, debug problems, and discern future directions. Anticipation of future needs is a critical part of this work.
• 10% communication of findings, work products, and other technical concepts in professional English and straightforward, understandable graphical metaphors.
• 10% other or additional duties, related to the primary scope of the role, as assigned by supervisors.

Required Qualifications:

All required qualifications must be included in the application materials. BA/BS degree with at least two years of relevant experience, or a combination of education and relevant work experience to equal at least six years.

Preferred Qualifications:

Experience with common digital processing techniques (filtering and frequency-domain transforms), with digital or analog electronics, and with GitHub-based code management.