The Sharpe Lab will transition to the University of Sydney in July 2023. All new members of the lab will join after this time in Sydney. If you’re interested in joining us in Australia, now is a good time to reach out!

We strive to be an inclusive group and welcome people from all backgrounds to apply to come into the lab. As a mentor, one of my priorities is getting trainees to the next stage of career, whether the goal is to establish a lab at an R1 institution, find a position in a teaching college, go into industry, secure a postdoctoral position, or get into graduate school. To achieve this, I am hands on in the process of experimental design, grant writing, and establishing an achievable set of targets that will help trainees to reach their next step. Postdocs and graduate students in the lab will also have experience to mentor students and are encouraged to take on mentorship wherever they would like.  

At present, our undergraduate and graduate student slots in the lab are full.

We are always open to postdocs applying to join our team. Below is some information on available postdoctoral positions. 

Open Postdoctoral Positions:

We have space for another 1-2 postdocs to work on NIH/NSF/BBRF-funded projects. These grants span the investigation of multiple neural circuits involved in reinforcement learning, including in both appetitive and aversive procedures. These projects use optogenetics, chemogenetics, and fiber photometry of genetically-encoded calcium and dopamine sensors, to study the role of neural circuits in various learning phenomena. Our most relevant publications to these projects would be Seitz et al. 2022 and Sharpe et al. 2021. If you are interested in applying to join the lab, you can contact me at melissa.j.sharpe@psych.ucla.edu. Let me know what you have been working on in the past, why you’re interested in the lab, and the kinds of projects you see yourself doing in the future.