Research Assistant/Associate in Imaging Neuroscience at Newcastle University

Company description:

We are a world class research-intensive university. We deliver teaching and learning of the highest quality. We play a leading role in economic, social and cultural development of the North East of England. Attracting and retaining high-calibre people is fundamental to our continued success.

Job description:

The Role

We are looking to recruit a motivated researcher interested in an exciting multi-disciplinary translational neuroscience project funded by the Motor Neuron Disease Scotland charity with the aim of developing a rapid, sensitive and entirely non-invasive diagnostic test for this disease. You will join a multi-disciplinary team of neuroscientists, MR physicists, neuroradiologists and computer scientists and will be primarily responsible for developing magnetic resonance imaging protocols to image skeletal motor unit activity first in healthy controls, and then in patients with motor neuron disease (MND).

Motor neurone disease (MND) – also known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) – is a rapidly disabling and fatal neurodegenerative disease affecting 1 in 10,000. The disease affects people at all ages, but more commonly affects individuals in their 50s and 60s. It is characterised by progressive, painless muscle wasting and weakness, which ultimately leads to immobility, respiratory failure and death. Underlying this devastating condition is the progressive loss of skeletal motor units (a single motor axon and all of the muscle fibres that this innervates). Current diagnostic tests are invasive, relatively insensitive, and available only in larger centres, meaning that patients still typically wait up to 12 months to get a diagnosis. This matters because it delays access to life-prolonging treatments and prevents early recruitment of patients to clinical trials of new therapies.

Our group has recently patented a novel method of imaging human motor units using a variation of diffusion-weighted MRI. We call this motor unit MRI or MUMRI, and are the only group in the world currently developing this technology. We have used MUMRI to study the earliest signs of motor unit dysfunction in MND patients and have already translated this to our local NHS hospital’s scanners. The aim of this project is to build on this work to develop and test methods of detecting both early and late disease stages in the same scan session, thereby creating a rapid, sensitive and entirely non-invasive diagnostic test for MND.

You will obtain the necessary regulatory approvals for these studies, arrange for both healthy volunteers and patients to attend scanning sessions, perform the experiments and analyse the imaging data. Data analysis will require the writing of custom analysis scripts, usually in the MATLAB environment. Finally, you will be responsible for producing publication-quality figures illustrating our findings, and for writing the first draft of manuscripts reporting the results.

This post is fixed term for a period until 30/11/2026

For informal enquiries contact: Professor Roger Whittaker r.whittaker@ncl.ac.uk