Clinical Operations

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 makes sure we can actually run studies with human participants.

Arbor's human studies use functional ultrasound imaging, and soon focused ultrasound neuromodulation. Participants are people with a sonolucent cranial implant, usually placed after surgery for traumatic brain injury, stroke, or a tumor. The studies are longitudinal: the same participant returns over months, first in the lab or clinic and eventually at home. We work in partnership with hospitals and academic centers, here and in the UK.

The program needs to grow, and much of the infrastructure for that doesn't exist yet. 

Part of the job is conventional clinical operations: IRB submissions and amendments, protocol preparation, site readiness, participant scheduling and support, safety monitoring, documentation, and training systems. You'd own all of it. We're small, so for now that means doing the work as much as overseeing it.

The second part is harder to specify and a bigger challenge. Our program will depend on the quality and scale of our relationships with clinicians and hospital departments. Building and maintaining those partnerships requires a real understanding of where our interests align. This would be yours to own.