---
title: 'Human Neuroscientist at Convergent Research'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/human-neuroscientist-convergent-research-san-francisco-srr8mbjxczm9'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Human Neuroscientist at Convergent Research

- **Company:** Convergent Research
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $183k–$210k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-03
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/convergentresearch/b8a937ae-ffeb-410e-b1a9-c24dc1a57c87

## Job description

## About Arbor Neuroscience

(formerly Forest Neurotech) Arbor is a nonprofit research organization working on one of the hardest open problems in clinical neuroscience: how to change brain circuits by design. Millions of people with depression, chronic pain, and other brain disorders have no treatment that works. Modulating activity in the brain circuits underlying their symptoms – with electrical stimulation, focused ultrasound, or magnetic stimulation – can work spectacularly well. But it doesn't work reliably, and we can't predict who it will help. That's what Arbor aims to fix. The starting point is a new class of experiment: intervene, measure how the circuit responds, track the symptom, and repeat in the same individual over months. We’re building the necessary experimental platform. It currently includes the Forest 1 ultrasound system, which works like a wearable functional MRI, but with higher resolution. The system images activity across large brain volumes, including deep brain structures, and will soon stimulate as well. We are also adding electrode-based interfaces in animal studies. From these data, we'll build models to make neuromodulation predictable. Arbor is a Focused Research Organization within the Convergent Research family, and the new name for Forest Neurotech. We're a mission-focused nonprofit, doing multidisciplinary translational work that doesn't fit in a lab or on a company roadmap. We have the funding to run the first phase, and we're a small team – the people we hire now will shape what Arbor becomes.

## The Role

This is the person who runs our human experiments.

Our human neuroscience program is expanding, building from a small intramural program and an active UK collaboration with ARIA. The studies will start with functional ultrasound imaging, later paired with focused ultrasound neuromodulation. Participants are people with a sonolucent cranial implant, usually placed after surgery for traumatic brain injury, stroke, or a tumor. These individuals often have comorbid conditions that neuromodulation may be able to improve. The studies are longitudinal and causal: intervene, image the circuit response, track the symptom, and repeat in the same person over months. Today the studies run in the clinic or lab; eventually we want to run them in participants' homes.

Your job is to make those experiments happen: designing the studies and running them, including travel to clinical sites, setting up rigs, collecting data alongside our staff and clinical partners, and interpreting the data we collect. You'd work directly with our analysis lead on the computational side and with engineers on the device platform.

We're hiring at multiple levels and will calibrate scope and title to your experience. At the earlier end, you'd run studies we've designed together and take on more as you go. With more experience, you'd own research lines end to end, hold our clinical site relationships, and help set the direction of the human research program alongside the CEO and the rest of the scientific team.

We're also still a small, startup-like organization, so everyone fills multiple roles, including hands-on science and the work that gets science done.

Note: We're also hiring a Head of Clinical Science, a broader role leading how Arbor thinks about clinical impact across the organization. If both sound like you, apply to either and tell us.

## What You’ll Do

- Design longitudinal, causal, within-subject human studies: imaging first, then neuromodulation

- Run those experiments, or oversee them as the program grows

- Own the experimental rigs: specify what's needed, keep them running, and work with our engineers on device usability and improvements

- Work with research collaborators, including travel to clinical sites

- Support participant recruitment alongside our clinical operations lead

- Analyze and interpret data, with our analysis lead

- Write up results, publish, and present at scientific meetings

- Help shape the human neuroscience program

Who We’re Looking For A PhD and experience running human neuroscience research. Your background could be cognitive, affective, or clinical neuroscience, human neuroimaging, or human neuromodulation. Prior work grounded in disease is a plus but not a requirement.

The successful candidate will have:

- Experience running human studies end to end, including recruitment, data collection, and analysis

- Comfort with hardware and software: you may not have built a rig, but you can troubleshoot one

- Sufficient computational skills to run standard data analyses on your own and to advise and critique more innovative ones

- Directness without friction – you say what you think, ask when you don't know, and aren't looking to compete with your colleagues

- A deep interest in seeing your work reach patients

Nice to have: functional or focused ultrasound experience; TMS, DBS, or intracranial neuromodulation work; experience with clinical populations; signal processing or imaging analysis; ability to design and build experimental rigs; IRB and protocol writing; having worked somewhere small enough that you had a lot to build.

Our benefits include: Medical, dental, and vision – most plans fully covered for you and your dependents 401(k) with up to 6% match Company-paid life and AD&D, with voluntary supplemental options 15 holidays plus a floating day for your birthday 3 weeks PTO increasing with tenure, and separate sick leave Arbor will consider sponsorship for U.S. work authorization case by case. Sponsorship isn't guaranteed, and immigration timelines can affect start dates. Where we sponsor, we cover the legal and government fees. Arbor is an equal opportunity employer. We hire based on talent and experience and don't discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

## About Convergent Research

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Convergent Research is a nonprofit organization that launches and supports Focused Research Organizations (FROs) to build foundational technologies that unblock scientific progress.
- **Entity Type**: Private Nonprofit (501(c)(3))
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2021
- **Founders**: Adam Marblestone, Anastasia Gamick

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Scientific Research and Development Services (NAICS 5417)
- **Target customers**: B2B — scientific researchers, universities, government agencies, and philanthropic funders; operates as a "mission control" launching public-good R&D projects.
- **Mission statement**: “Spectacularly good futures are within reach, but only if we mind the gaps. Scientists need essential technologies to do the groundbreaking research all of us depend on.”

## Products & Services
Convergent Research does not sell commercial products. Instead, it incubates **Focused Research Organizations (FROs)** – time-bound, technically ambitious nonprofit efforts designed to produce high-impact public goods. Current and past FROs/projects include:

- **Cultivarium**: Developing tools for studying novel (previously unculturable) microorganisms.
- **E11 Bio (EVE Bio)**: Brain circuit mapping technologies.
- **Forest Neurotech**: Neural technology and biosensing platforms.
- **Ocean CDR Atlas**: Open-access tool for ocean-based carbon dioxide removal measurement.
- **Fundamental Development Gap Map (v1.0)**: A public web portal identifying bottlenecks holding back science.

Convergent Research provides shared operational support (legal, finance, HR, communications) across all FROs.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not applicable (nonprofit).
- **Annual Revenue (FY2024)**: **$72.4 million** (ProPublica IRS filing). Total revenue for FY2024 was $100.1 million.
- **Total Grant Funding Received**: At least $25.1 million from Vanguard Charitable, $9.5 million from Probabilistic Computing Foundation, $8 million from The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation (latest filings).
- **Total Funding Raised**: ~$2 million in disclosed grants (led by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 2023); the vast majority comes from additional major philanthropic gifts not categorized as single-investor rounds.
- **Notable Partners/Funders**: Advanced Research and Intervention Agency (ARIA, UK), Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, Vanguard Charitable, Probabilistic Computing Foundation.
- **Growth Signals**: 164 employees (as of latest CauseIQ data, up from ~23 on LinkedIn); headquarter presence in Palo Alto, Cambridge (MA), and Boulder (CO); expanded into the UK via a collaboration with ARIA (“FROST UK”); 15 active job postings with 25% month-over-month posting growth.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Novel institutional model**: Focused Research Organizations (FROs) fill a gap between traditional academia and for-profit startups — targeted, time-boxed, public-good missions.
- **Lean central infrastructure**: Shared operational support lets FRO scientists focus purely on technical breakthroughs, avoiding administrative overhead.
- **High-caliber scientific network**: Leaders include senior scientists from MIT, Caltech, King’s College London, and CMU as grantees/collaborators.
- **Access to major philanthropic capital**: Partners with some of the largest climate and science foundations globally.

## Strategic Focus
- **Geographic expansion**: Formal partnership with ARIA in the UK to launch FROs abroad (“FROST UK”).
- **Gap mapping**: Releasing and refining the Fundamental Development Gap Map to systematically identify the biggest bottlenecks in science.
- **Scaling the FRO model**: Adding new FROs in ocean CDR, neuroscience, and molecular engineering; hiring Founders in Residence to spin up new efforts.
- **Public data as product**: Committed to releasing open datasets and protocols (e.g., drug–target assay data, Lean proof library) as public goods.

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-driven**: Direct, hands-on impact on solving foundational scientific bottlenecks rather than incremental product improvements.
- **Culture**: Described as “mission control” — fast-paced, collaborative, technical. Leadership emphasizes pushing high-risk, high-reward projects.
- **Locations**: On-site positions in Palo Alto (CA), Cambridge/Boston (MA), and Boulder (CO). Some roles are US- or UK-based.
- **Team composition**: Small, senior-heavy centralized team (~20 core staff in Palo Alto) plus larger distributed FRO project teams (~164 total organization-wide). Significant cross-functional work across legal, finance, operations, and science.
- **Typical roles**: Postdoctoral Research Scientists, Research Associates, Biosensing Engineers, Finance/Operations Managers, General Counsel.
- **Compensation transparency (IRS filing)**: CEO Adam Marblestone — $431,025; President Anastasia Gamick — $360,495; competitive nonprofit scientific salaries.
- **Notable perks**: Working with world-class scientists and funders; contributions to genuinely public-good science; tax-deductible donation eligible organization.
- **Remote/hybrid**: Mostly on-site (Boulder, Palo Alto, Cambridge); limited remote possibilities depending on role.

## Sources
1. [convergentresearch.org](https://www.convergentresearch.org/)
2. [jobs.lever.co/convergentresearch](https://jobs.lever.co/convergentresearch)
3. [linkedin.com/company/convergent-research](https://linkedin.com/company/convergent-research)
4. [causeiq.com – Convergent Research](https://www.causeiq.com/organizations/convergent-research,883013217/)
5. [projects.propublica.org – Convergent Research Inc](https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/883013217)

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