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

Mar 2025:   On Biomedical AI in Harvard Gazette

Read about AI in medicine in the latest Harvard Gazette and New York Times.

Mar 2025:   TxAgent: AI Agent for Therapeutic Reasoning

TxAgent is an AI agent for therapeutic reasoning that consolidates 211 tools from trusted sources, including all US FDA-approved drugs since 1939 and validated clinical insights. [Project website] [TxAgent] [ToolUniverse]

Mar 2025:   Multimodal AI predicts clinical outcomes of drug combinations from preclinical data

Mar 2025:   KGARevion: AI Agent for Knowledge-Intensive Biomedical QA

KGARevion is an AI agent designed for complex biomedical QA that integrates the non-codified knowledge of LLMs with the structured, codified knowledge found in knowledge graphs. [ICLR 2025 publication]

Feb 2025:   MedTok: Unlocking Medical Codes for GenAI

Meet MedTok, a multimodal medical code tokenizer that transforms how AI understands structured medical data. By integrating textual descriptions and relational contexts, MedTok enhances tokenization for transformer-based models—powering everything from EHR foundation models to medical QA. [Project website]

Feb 2025:   What If You Could Rewrite Biology? Meet CLEF

What if we could anticipate molecular and medical changes before they happen? Introducing CLEF, an approach for counterfactual generation in biological and medical sequence models. [Project website]

Feb 2025:   Digital Twins as Global Health and Disease Models

Jan 2025:   LLM and KG+LLM agent papers at ICLR

Jan 2025:   Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 2

Excited to share our new graduate course on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 2.

Jan 2025:   ProCyon AI Highlighted by Kempner

Thanks to Kempner Institute for highlighting our latest research, ProCyon, our protein-text foundation model for modeling protein functions.

Jan 2025:   AI Design of Proteins for Therapeutics

Dec 2024:   Unified Clinical Vocabulary Embeddings

New paper: A unified resource provides a new representation of clinical knowledge by unifying medical vocabularies. (1) Phenotype risk score analysis across 4.57 million patients, (2) Inter-institutional clinician panels evaluate alignment with clinical knowledge across 90 diseases and 3,000 clinical codes.

Dec 2024:   SPECTRA in Nature Machine Intelligence

Are biomedical AI models truly as smart as they seem? SPECTRA is a framework that evaluates models by considering the full spectrum of cross-split overlap: train-test similarity. SPECTRA reveals gaps in benchmarks for molecular sequence data across 19 models, including LLMs, GNNs, diffusion models, and conv nets.

Nov 2024:   Ayush Noori Selected as a Rhodes Scholar

Congratulations to Ayush Noori on being named a Rhodes Scholar! Such an incredible achievement!

Nov 2024:   PocketGen in Nature Machine Intelligence

Oct 2024:   Activity Cliffs in Molecular Properties

Oct 2024:   Knowledge Graph Agent for Medical Reasoning

Sep 2024:   Three Papers Accepted to NeurIPS

Exciting projects include a unified multi-task time series model, a flow-matching approach for generating protein pockets using geometric priors, and a tokenization method that produces invariant molecular representations for integration into large language models.

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