Open Positions

Thank you for your interest in joining our group! Impactful research requires excellent mentoring. Prof. Zitnik is the recipient of the Young Mentor Award at Harvard Medical School—this prestigious award acknowledges that recognition to Prof. Zitnik.


PhD students

We are taking on new PhD students every year.

If you are a current or a newly admitted PhD student interested in developing AI and machine learning methods and/or using AI to advance therapeutics and medicine, email Prof. Zitnik directly. Include your CV and a brief description of your research interests.

We are recruiting PhD students from a number of graduate programs, including Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics, Biomedical Informatics, Systems Biology, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, programs within Harvard Integrated Life Sciences, and other programs at Harvard.

We also recruit graduate students from Harvard/MIT Health Sciences & Technology and other programs such as EECS at MIT.


Postdoctoral research fellows in generative, multimodal, and agentic AI

We have multiple openings for postdoctoral research fellows in multimodal learning, generative AI, and AI agents.

This position is available immediately. Interested candidates are encouraged to submit their applications as soon as possible.

NOW OPEN: Request For Applications


Postdoctoral research fellows in AI for therapeutics

We have multiple openings for postdoctoral research fellows in AI for therapeutics.

This position is available immediately. Interested candidates are encouraged to submit their applications as soon as possible.

NOW OPEN: Request For Applications


Postdoctoral research fellows in medical AI

We have multiple openings for postdoctoral research fellows in medical AI.

This position is available immediately. Interested candidates are encouraged to submit their applications as soon as possible.

NOW OPEN: Request For Applications


AI project coordinator

We have an opening for an AI project coordinator.

We are reviewing applications on a rolling basis. Interested candidates are encouraged to submit their applications early.

NOW OPEN: Request For Applications


Research AI engineer

We have an opening for a Research AI Engineer.

We are reviewing applications on a rolling basis. Interested candidates are encouraged to submit their applications early.

NOW OPEN: Request For Applications


Postdoctoral research fellows with Harvard Data Science Initiative

Our lab is affiliated with the Harvard Data Science Initiative, which recruits fellows through a highly competitive process each year.

HDSI fellows work independently over a two-year fellowship and are advised by Harvard University faculty. Applications open annually in the fall.


Postdoctoral research fellows with Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center

Our lab is affiliated with the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute recruits postdoctoral fellows who have the opportunity to collaborate with any Broad-affiliated faculty. Interested applicants are encouraged to indicate their intention to work in our lab in their statement of purpose.


Harvard/MIT undergraduates, Masters’s students, Harvard affiliates

We are looking for outstanding undergraduates, Masters’s students, and Harvard/MIT affiliates on a rolling basis. While we take students at all levels, excellent grades and/or prior experience in machine learning is a plus. We provide mentoring on cutting-edge research.

Generally, we expect:

  • Students commit 20 hours per week to research.
  • Students commit to at least 6 months of research with the lab (ideally more).
  • Prior experience in at least one of the following, which can be demonstrated through coursework, publications, research projects, and codebases:
    • AI and machine learning, including theoretical understanding or practical experience in training and applying large-scale models.
    • Multi-omics, cell biology, structural biology, computational biology, and medicine, therapeutics.

Email Prof. Zitnik. Include your CV, current academic status, a summary of research experience, and brief highlights of projects.


Visitors, interns, and short-term students

We generally prioritize applications that include visits of six months or more in order to carry out a high-quality project.

Because of the large email load that Prof. Zitnik receives, she may not respond to all applicants. Do not take this personally! We do review all applications!


Harvard is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Latest News

Oct 2025:   A Scientist's Guide to AI Agents in Nature

A piece on AI agents in Nature highlights ongoing projects in our group, including methods for evaluating scientific hypotheses, challenges in benchmarking AI agents, and the open ToolUniverse ecosystem.

Sep 2025:   ToolUniverse: AI Agents for Science and Medicine

New paper: ToolUniverse introduces an open ecosystem for building AI scientists with 600+ scientific and biomedical tools. Build your AI co-scientists at https://aiscientist.tools.

Sep 2025:   Democratizing "AI Scientists" with ToolUniverse

Our new initiative: Use Tool Universe to build an AI scientist for yourself from any language or reasoning model, whether open or closed. https://aiscientist.tools

Sep 2025:   InfEHR in Nature Communications

Collaboration with Ben and Girish on clinical phenotype resolution through deep geometric learning on electronic health records published in Nature Communications.

Sep 2025:   PDGrapher in Nature Biomedical Engineering

New paper in Nature Biomedical Engineering introducing PDGrapher, a model for phenotype-based target discovery. [Harvard Medicine News]

Sep 2025:   AI and Net Medicine: Path to Precision Medicine

Aug 2025:   CUREBench - Reasoning for Therapeutics

Update from CUREBench: 650+ entrants, 100+ teams and 500+ submissions. Thank you to the CUREBench community. Working on AI for drug discovery and reasoning in medicine? New teams welcome. Tasks, rules, and leaderboard: https://curebench.ai.

Aug 2025:   Drug Discovery Workshop at NeurIPS 2025

Excited to organize a NeurIPS workshop on Virtual Cells and Digital Instruments. Submit your papers.

Aug 2025:   AI for Science Workshop at NeurIPS

Excited to organize a NeurIPS workshop on AI for Science. This is our 6th workshop in the AI for Science series. Submit your papers.

Jul 2025:   Launching CUREBench

Launched CUREBench, the first competition in AI reasoning for therapeutics. Colocated with NeurIPS 2025. Start at https://curebench.ai.

Jul 2025:   Launching TxAgent Evaluation Portal

Launched TxAgent evaluation portal, our global evaluation of AI for drug decision-making and therapeutic reasoning. Participate in TxAgent evaluations! [TxAgent project]

Jul 2025:   SPATIA Model of Spatial Cell Phenotypes

Jul 2025:   AI-Enabled Drug Discovery Reaches Clinical Milestone

Jun 2025:   Knowledge Tracing for Biomedical AI Education

New preprint on biologically inspired architecture for knowledge tracing. The study on the use of generative AI in education with prospective evaluation of knowledge tracing in the classroom.

Jun 2025:   Few shot learning for rare disease diagnosis

Jun 2025:   One Patient, Many Contexts: Scaling Medical AI

Jun 2025:   ToolUniverse - 211+ Tools for "AI Scientist" Agents

ToolUniverse now offers access to over 211 cutting-edge biological and medical tools, all integrated with Model Context Protocol (MCP). Any “AI Scientist” agent can tap into these tools for biomedical research. [Tutorial] [ToolUniverse] [TxAgent]

May 2025:   What Perturbation Can Reverse Disease Effects?

In press at Nature Biomedical Engineering: PDGrapher AI predicts chemicals to reverse disease phenotypic effects — with applications to drug target identification.

May 2025:   Decision Transformers for Cell Reprogramming

New preprint: Decision transformers for generating reach-avoid policies in sequential decision making — with applications from robotics to cell reprogramming.

May 2025:   COMPASS: Immunotherapy Outcome Prediction

Zitnik Lab  ·  Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Science  ·  Harvard  ·  Department of Biomedical Informatics