Description

Professor Joaquín J. Torres, from the Department of Electromagnetism and Matter Physics at the University of Granada, welcomes postdoctoral candidates interested in applying for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (MSCA-PF) in 2023 at this University. Please note that applicants must comply with the Mobility Rule (for more information about the 2023 call, please consult:(http://sl.ugr.es/0d7F)

Brief description of the institution:

The University of Granada (UGR) was founded in 1531 and is one of the largest and most important universities in Spain. With over 51,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students and almost 3,000 members of staff, the UGR offers over 90 undergraduate degrees, 160 master’s degrees (8 of which are international double degrees) and 28 doctoral programmes via its 124 departments and nearly 50 centers. Accordingly, the UGR offers one of the most extensive and diverse ranges of higher education programmes in Spain.

The UGR has been awarded with the "Human Resources Excellence in Research (HRS4R)", which reflects the institution’s commitment to continuously improving its human resource policies in line with the European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers. The UGR is also internationally renowned for its excellence in diverse research fields and ranked among the top Spanish universities in a variety of ranking criteria, such as national R&D projects, fellowships awarded, publications, and international funding.

The UGR is one of the few Spanish Universities listed in the Shanghai Top 500 ranking - Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). The 2022 edition of the ARWU places the UGR in 201-300th position in the world and as the 2-5 highest ranked universities in Spain (http://sl.ugr.es/0d7D), reaffirming its position as an institution at the forefront of national and international research. The UGR stands out in the specialties of Library & Information Science (position 38); Food Science & Technology (30) and Hospitality & Tourism Management (51-75), according to the latest edition of this prestigious ranking by specialties (http://sl.ugr.es/0bSp). A little lower in the ranking, the UGR also stands out in Mathematics (76-100).

Additionally, the UGR has 9 researchers who are at the top of the Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) list (http://sl.ugr.es/0d7E), most of these related to the area of Computer Science. It is also well recognized for its web presence (http://sl.ugr.es/0a6i), being positioned at 42th place in the top 200 Universities in Europe.

Internationally, the University of Granada is firmly committed to its participation in the calls of the Framework Programme of the European Union. For the duration of the last Framework Programme, Horizon 2020, the UGR obtained a total 120 projects with a total funding of around 29,4 million euros.  For the current Framework Programme, Horizon Europe, the UGR has obtained 38 projects, so far, with total funding around 11 € million.

Brief description of the Centre/Research Group:

Our research group is constituted by several very experienced physicists who investigate many aspects of non-equilibrium statistical and computational physics and complex networks, with application in different research fields, including biology, biophysics, neuroscience, computational neuroscience, neurophysics and machine learning both classical and quatum. Also we are interested to develop new paradigms of non-equilibrium neural networks biologically inspired. Recently we have focused our research in the understanding of how phase transitions can occur in the brain and how we can detect them by analysing particular features in EEG recordings. Also we are developing new research lines at the interface of neurobiology and quantum physics with application to quantum machine learning.

Project description:

The researcher will be incorporated in a research line associated to different neuroscience, computational neuroscience and neurophysics projects we are interested on. In particular, we are interested to develop mathematical models of a growing neural medium that can explain, for instance, different synaptic pruning profiles, and the neurological disorders associated to them, such as autism and schizophrenia. In particular, the researcher will develop new brain activity mathematical models where particular connectivity patterns which are the result of the synaptic pruning mechanisms can be integrated. We are also interested to study the dynamical mechanisms that are involved in generation of spiking activity in a neural medium in the presence of noise that can induce interesting phenomena such as stochastic resonance or inverse stochastic resonance, to study their computational implications. Additionally, are also interested to study the role of the so-called spin-glasses states in brain function. Finally, we are interested to design new paradigms of quantum neural networks which are bioinspired and to study their computational properties.

Research Area:

• Information Science and Engineering (ENG)

• Physics (PHY)

For a correct evaluation of your candidature, please send the documents below to Professor Joaquín J. Torres (jtorres@onsager.ugr.es):

• CV
• Letter of recommendation (optional)