Research Assistant-Professional Student, Internal Medicine, Dell Medical School

Job Posting Title:

Research Assistant-Professional Student, Internal Medicine, Dell Medical School

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Hiring Department:

Department of Medicine

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Position Open To:

All Applicants

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Weekly Scheduled Hours:

8

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FLSA Status:

Non-Exempt from FLSA

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Earliest Start Date:

Aug 24, 2026

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Position Duration:

Expected to Continue Until Aug 31, 2027

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Location:

UT MAIN CAMPUS

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Job Details:

General Notes

Position is funded by a K12 Mentored Career Development Award in Clinical and Translational Science. A Claude Code Enterprise Max subscription is provided for the duration of the appointment. Co-authorship on resulting publications is available consistent with contribution.

Purpose

The Research Assistant-Professional Student will help design, build, and evaluate a clinical decision-support application for Long COVID currently used by clinicians and being prepared for wider deployment. This is a hands-on building role on a live system, not a support role. The RA will work closely and directly with Dr. Brode, using AI coding assistants (primarily Claude Code): collaborating on development specifications, implementing and QAing features, running evaluation harnesses, and helping move the application toward public availability. The role suits someone who takes initiative, finishes what they start, and is comfortable exercising judgment in a fast-moving technical environment. A genuine interest in clinical decision support, bioinformatics, or biostatistics matters more here than any particular credential.

Responsibilities

Feature Development and Quality Assurance

• Implement, test, and QA features on a production Flask/React clinical AI application, working from shared development specifications.
• Work primarily through AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Codex) as the development medium, exercising critical judgment about generated output rather than accepting it.
• Contribute to release readiness: bug triage, regression testing, and documentation ahead of deployment milestones.

Evaluation Execution

• Administer and manage a multi-reviewer blinded evaluation study, including survey instrument ownership, reviewer coordination, and data collection.
• Run and maintain automated evaluation harnesses (safety testing, citation fidelity, factuality checks).
• Clean, validate, and deliver analysis-ready datasets, including inter-rater reliability.

Research Operations and Dissemination

• Produce figures, tables, and supplementary materials for manuscripts and conference submissions.
• Manage references and citation records; handle journal submission mechanics.
• Maintain study documentation under IRB-approved protocols.

Design and User Research

• Support usability and co-design sessions with clinicians and patients.
• Contribute to interface refinement and to health-literacy-appropriate content for patient-facing work.
• Note: this function may scale up substantially depending on the direction the project takes in Year 2.

Required Qualifications

• Currently enrolled in a graduate or professional degree program at UT Austin, and eligible for student employment for the duration of the appointment (including summer enrollment requirements).

• Experience building something functional yourself, using an AI coding assistant as part of how you work (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar). Scale does not matter and beginners are welcome. What matters is that you have taken something from an idea to working, and that you were the one driving. See supplemental questions.

• Able to work independently in a technical environment: you can get your own tools running, tell whether generated code is doing what you actually asked for, and troubleshoot.

• Strong written communication, including the ability to give clear, proactive status updates without prompting.

Relevant education and experience may be substituted as appropriate.

Preferred Qualifications

• Working familiarity with Python. Depth is not required.

• Experience in user experience design, user research, or qualitative methods. This role has real design and co-design work in it, and a strong background here is valued even if your technical experience is earlier-stage.

• A portfolio of completed projects: public repositori