Overview

Prof. Marinka Zitnik invites applications for a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship position at Harvard University.

The selected candidates will lead cutting-edge research in therapeutic AI, focusing on target discovery, design and prediction of complex perturbations, virtual molecular simulators, biomarker discovery, treatment response prediction, molecular design and optimization, biomolecular interaction modeling, clinical drug development, and drug repurposing. Research efforts will also include patient selection for therapeutic development and treatment matching and the study of drug effects across multi-scale molecular and cellular contexts.

This work will develop and leverage advanced methods in geometric deep learning, large-scale knowledge graphs, and biomedical foundation models to tackle key challenges in drug design and precision therapy.

Interested candidates are encouraged to explore our recent publications and research directions before submitting their applications.

Qualifications

We are seeking highly motivated applicants with expertise in one or more of the following areas: agentic AI, geometric deep learning, large-scale knowledge graphs, biomedical foundation models, multimodal learning, and generative AI. Strong technical skills and prior experience in therapeutic science, drug design, or clinical drug development are essential. If you have both a track record in AI research and wet lab experience, that is fantastic.

Ideal candidates will have demonstrably strong research skills, evidenced by multiple publications in top-tier machine learning or artificial intelligence conferences and/or leading scientific journals.

Candidates must hold a Ph.D. or equivalent degree in machine learning, computer science or a closely related field.

Excellent programming skills and practical experience with leading machine learning frameworks are required. Applicants must have experience applying AI to biology and medicine. Familiarity with modern AI environments, including multi-GPU model training and large-scale inference on dozens to hundreds of GPUs, is a plus.

Application process

The position is available immediately and can be renewed annually. Interested applicants should submit the following documents via email to Prof. Zitnik and use the subject line “Postdoctoral Research Fellows in AI for Therapeutics”:

• Curriculum Vitae (include links to your academic webpage and GitHub repositories for methods you developed)
• Three representative publications (preprints are acceptable)
• Statement of research (two pages) describing prior research experience and future research plan
• Contacts for three letters of recommendation (the letters will be solicited after the initial review)

We are currently reviewing applications. 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.