Postdoctoral Research Associate

Requisition Id 15434 

Overview:

The Advanced Computing in Health Sciences (ACH) section at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is seeking qualified applicants for a Postdoctoral Research Associate position for health research projects. The research activities include HIPAA compliant research data that has been entrusted to ORNL by sponsors such as the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). As such, you will have the opportunity to work on some of the most challenging and impactful research and development programs in healthcare informatics, bioinformatics, high performance computing and deep learning.

 

The candidate will work in a collaborative research and development environment focusing on designing, implementing, and applying robust and high performance applications for biomedical research. The candidate’s work will focus on developing AI methods, training AI models, and creating agentic AI workflows on DOE supercomputers and applying them to population-level cancer research in collaboration with partners at institutions like the VA and NCI. It will also include collaborations across the ORNL and DOE research landscape. This position requires novel thinking, teamwork, and discovery in finding new approaches for analyzing massive and complex data, collaborating with experts, and publishing significant results.

 

 

Major Duties and Responsibilities:

As a Computational Scientist you will be responsible for:

• Developing high-quality code following best practices in the community for documentation, provenance, version control, etc.
• Participating in research projects in AI modeling and workflows using high performance computing with applications to health sciences and related domains
• Preparing manuscripts and dissemination of research results in publications and conferences.
• Working in secure enclaves and open computing environments on a wide variety of applied areas.
• Conducting tasks independently and communicate effectively to team members and stakeholders.
• Delivering ORNL’s mission by aligning behaviors, priorities, and interactions with our core values of Impact, Integrity, Teamwork, Safety, and Service.

 

 

Basic Qualifications:

• PhD in a computational discipline such as Data Science, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, or a related field.
• Experience with a deep learning framework like PyTorch.
• Strong interest in developing and using agentic AI workflows to advance the way in which computational science is conducted
• Self-disciplined work ethic and eagerness to tackle challenging research problems.

 

Preferred Qualifications:

• Familiarity with running on scheduled clusters or cloud services.
• Experience in developing and applying biostatistics, AI, and ML-based solutions to healthcare data.
• Experience developing or applying parallel algorithms and scalable workflows for HPC resources.
• Experience developing or applying privacy-enhancing technologies such as federated learning, differential privacy, and synthetic data
• Experience with generative AI methods and libraries (architectures like large language models and vision transformers, inference engines like vLLM, domain specific languages like Triton, workflow libraries like LangGraph, etc.).

 

Security, Credentialing, and Eligibility Requirements:
For employment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), a Real ID compliant form of identification will be required.  Additionally, ORNL is subject to Department of Energy (DOE) access restrictions. All employees must also be able to obtain and maintain a federal Personal Identity Verification (PIV) card as mandated by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12) and Department of Energy (DOE) Order 473.1A, which requires a favorable post-employment background investigation.

To obtain this credential, new employees must successfully complete and pass a Federal Tier 1 background check investigation.  This investigation includes a declaration of illegal drug activities, including use, supply, possession, or manufacture within the last year.  This includes marijuana and cann