AI in Business, Postdoctoral Research Fellow

About the role

The James Silberrad Brown Center for Artificial Intelligence (JSB AI Center) seeks a full-time Research Fellow to play a central role in advancing its interdisciplinary AI research agenda. This position is designed for a technically strong researcher who can provide leadership and continuity across multi-stage research projects while contributing to the Center’s long-term growth and external funding strategy.

Responsibilities

• Research Leadership

• Design and lead independent and collaborative research projects in multimodal AI, foundation models, social robotics, and applied AI.
• Develop and manage experiments using the Center’s high-performance computing systems with clear documentation and reproducible workflows.
• Contribute to model development integrating audio, vision, language, and sensor data for embodied and socially intelligent systems.
• Drive publication output from concept development through submission to leading venues.

• Grant Development & Program Growth

• Co-lead development of federal, foundation, and industry grant proposals, including technical narratives, research design, and budgets.
• Support grant reporting, deliverables tracking, and coordination across interdisciplinary teams.
• Strengthen the Center’s long-term research capacity through sustained external funding efforts.

• Mentorship & Collaboration

• Mentor undergraduate and graduate students in experiment design, technical implementation, and scientific writing.
• Facilitate collaboration across modeling, robotics, information systems, and applied research teams.
• Coordinate with engineering partners to ensure research outputs support real-world deployment.

• Dissemination & Impact

• Publish in leading AI, technical, and business journals and conferences.
• Present research to academic, industry, and community audiences.
• Contribute to applied research partnerships in education, healthcare, and community settings.

Qualifications

• Education and Experience

• Ph.D. in Management Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, Robotics, Cognitive Science, or a related field (completed or expected by start date)

• Key Qualifications

• Experience with deep learning frameworks, especially PyTorch, and with high-performance computing environments.
• Experience with multi-GPU training and distributed computing workflows.
• Evidence of peer-reviewed publications or manuscripts under review.
• Strong research writing skills and experience contributing to manuscripts or proposals.
• Commitment to collaboration, student mentorship, and active engagement in daily JSB AI Center activities.
• Experience with multimodal learning, vision-language models, audio or speech processing, or large language models is preferred.
• Familiarity with fine-tuning methods such as LoRA, PEFT, and QLoRA, and with experiment tracking tools such as Weights and Biases or MLflow is preferred.
• Background in AI for education, healthcare, mental health, or social behavior modeling is preferred.
• Experience with self-supervised learning approaches, including contrastive learning or masked prediction methods is preferred.
• A track record of contributing to successful grant proposals is preferred.
• Experience mentoring or coordinating student research teams is preferred.