Internship position

Title: Measuring exploration behaviour and social interactions in mice.

Keywords: Animal behaviour, Neuroscience, Social networks.

Duration: 4 between March and June 2024.

Application deadline: February 1, 2024.

Location: Inmed -- Institut des neurosciences de la Méditerranée (CNRS UMR 1249), Marseille, France.

Topic: Julie Koenig, researcher at the Inmed and Mathieu Génois, researcher at the CPT, offer an interdisciplinary internship between neuroscience and physics on the quantitative study of behaviour in mice. The project is centered on an experimental setup consisting of an arena in which a group mice can evolve freely, monitored by a camera. Trajectories of the individual mice are automatically extracted from the video footage via a pre-trained machine learning algorithm. The aim of the internship is first to establish the pipeline to get data from the experimental setup. It consists first in making sure that the individual trajectories are properly detected by the algorithm. Then, using both video footage and trajectory data, the goal is to identify the different types of interaction between mice, and from this to design an automatic method to extract them from the trajectory data.

Once the data pipeline is set, trajectories can be studied from an active matter perspective, to understand what their characteristics are, and whether a simple model reproducing them can be built. Social interactions define a temporal network of contacts, which properties can be compared to human ones to identify whether they share some similarities. Finally, as the properties of the trajectories constrain the social interactions, data from this experiment can help understand the relation between spatial dynamics of particles and temporal networks of contacts, and help design realistic models for them.

The internship may continue to a PhD position.

Profile:

• Master student in Biology, Animal behaviour, Computational social science.
• Good proficiency in programming (Python).
• Knowledge of neurosciences, complex systems and networks would be useful.
• Interest in interdisciplinary work is a plus.

Contact:
If you are interested, send a CV at:

julie.koenig [at] univ-amu.fr

mathieu.genois [at] univ-amu.fr