Overview

Prof. Marinka Zitnik invites applications for the position of AI Project Coordinator at Harvard University. This role provides a unique opportunity to coordinate cutting-edge research at the intersection of AI, medicine, and biology while fostering collaboration within a world-class academic environment.

We are seeking a creative, ambitious, and highly motivated individual to join our lab of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. The AI Project Coordinator will play a role in managing research initiatives and translating complex technical developments into actionable tools to empower biomedical discovery. This position requires a combination of technical expertise, exceptional organizational skills, and the ability to communicate effectively across academic and scientific domains.

Key responsibilities include:

• Working closely with Prof. Zitnik to engage lab collaborators, institutions, and partners.
• Acting as a research representative in partnerships, attending meetings, and effectively communicating our research work.
• Coordinate technical projects, collaborating with partners to ensure the successful execution of joint initiatives.
• Highlighting and communicating key results through tutorials and outreach efforts to showcase the impact of our research.

Qualifications

The ideal candidate will have:

• A strong technical background in AI or computational sciences, with familiarity in biology or medicine.
• Exceptional writing skills, with experience producing high-quality technical content such as research papers.
• Strong verbal communication skills, capable of presenting complex ideas clearly to academics and non-specialists.
• A proven ability to represent academic research projects in meetings with collaborators, institutions, and foundations.
• Experience with academic partnerships, including writing research proposals.
• Excellent organizational abilities, with experience in managing projects, timelines, and resources.

Candidates must hold a Ph.D. or equivalent degree in computer science, engineering, computational biomedicine or a related quantitative field. Previous experience in an academic research setting is strongly preferred.

Location

On campus of Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.

Application process

Interested applicants should submit the following documents via email to Prof. Zitnik and use the subject line “AI Project Coordinator”:

• Cover letter
• Curriculum Vitae
• Two to three representative publications or examples of written technical documentation
• Two to three examples of written proposals
• Two to three letters of recommendation (will be solicited after the initial review)

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

Advisor

Marinka Zitnik is an Assistant Professor at Harvard University with appointments in the Department of Biomedical Informatics, Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Harvard Data Science. We investigate machine learning with a current focus on learning systems informed by geometry, structure, and symmetry and grounded in knowledge. This approach creates foundational models, including pre-trained, self-supervised, multi-purpose, and multi-modal models trained at scale to enable broad generalization. Our methods produce actionable outputs to advance biological problems past the state of the art and open up new opportunities.

Dr. Zitnik has published extensively in top ML venues, such as NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, and leading scientific journals, including Nature, Nature Methods, Nature Communications, and PNAS. She has organized numerous workshops and tutorials in the nexus of AI, deep learning, AI4Science and AI4Medicine at leading conferences, where she is also in the organizing committees.

Her research received best paper and research awards from International Society for Computational Biology, International Conference on Machine Learning, Bayer Early Excellence in Science Award, Amazon Faculty Research Award, Google Faculty Research Scholar Award, Roche Alliance with Distinguished Scientists Award, Sanofi iDEA-iTECH Award, Rising Star Award in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and Next Generation Recognition in Biomedicine, being the only young scientist with such recognition in both EECS and Biomedicine. Dr. Zitnik received the Kavli Fellowship by the US National Academy of Sciences and the Kaneb Fellowship award at Harvard Medical School. She also received the NSF CAREER Award.

Dr. Zitnik is an ELLIS Scholar in the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) Society. She is a member of the Science Working Group at NASA Space Biology. Dr. Zitnik co-founded Therapeutics Data Commons and is the faculty lead of the AI4Science initiative. Dr. Zitnik is the recipient of the 2022 Young Mentor Award at Harvard Medical School.

Harvard is an Equal Opportunity Employer.