Postdoctoral Researcher

POSTING TITLE : Research Fellow (Postdoctoral Researcher) — AI for Healthcare & Biomedical Data Science — Jin Lab

Position Summary

The Jin Laboratory at the MaineHealth Institute for Research, Scarborough, ME is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Fellow to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence methods for healthcare and biological discovery.

The Jin lab focuses on building robust, interpretable and uncertainty-aware AI systems that can improve clinical decision-making and uncover biological mechanisms of disease development. Our work sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, clinical research and biology, with the goal of making real impact to improve the patient care. We are privileged to have the lab located at MaineHealth, the largest healthcare system in the state of Maine, enabling significant clinical data access and a unique opportunity of implementing our AI tools in real-world settings for improving patient care. Jin Lab has developed a wide collaboration across multiple institutions including Brigham and Women’s hospital, Harvard Medical School, Roux Institute at Northeastern University, Jackson Laboratory, Van Andel Institute and A*STAR Institute.

The Research Fellow will conduct research under the guidance of the Principal Investigator, Dr. Qingchu Jin. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to lead and contribute to projects addressing a range of clinically and biologically motivated research questions. All projects are grounded in either clinical problems or biological discovery. Current research in the lab involves the analysis of large-scale biomedical datasets, including longitudinal electronic health record (EHR) data, unstructured clinical notes, and multi-omics datasets such as DNA methylation, RNA sequencing, genomics, lipidomics, metabolomics, and microbiome data. The Research Fellow is encouraged to develop their own research ideas in the research directions described in the following text. The Fellow is also encouraged to apply for postdoctoral fellowships and career development grants. The Research Fellow will have access to substantial computational resources, including local GPU clusters, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the Explorer high-performance computing cluster at Northeastern University. The Research Fellow will work closely with clinicians, clinical scientist, biologist and computational scientist across MaineHealth and partnered institutions. The fellow will have the opportunity to publish in high-impact journals, top-tier computer scientist conferences and contribute to collaborative grants.

Research directions

All projects are highly collaborative with clinicians and biologist to achieve real-world impact.

Real-time AI-driven Patient Risk Prediction for Cardiac Surgery Patient. (with Maine Medical Center, Roux Institute at Northeastern University, Nihon Kohden Digital Health Solution and Brigham and Women’s hospital)This project aims to develop an AI-driven real-time prediction model to monitor the risk of patient in the ICU after the cardiac surgery. We will have the opportunity to perform multi-center external validation and implement our algorithm at the cardiovascular ICU to examine the clinical benefits and potentially improve patient care!

Childhood Growth Trajectory Research (withA*STAR, Singapore and Van Andel Institute and Roux Institute at Northeastern University) This project aims to identify early life multi-omics data to predict the childhood and adolescent growth trajectory. A wide spectrum of omics data at early life stage including genomics, RNAseq, methylation, lipidomics and microbiome will be available for analysis. We expect to identify novel multi-omics signatures that enable the discovery of new patient subgroups and may ultimately inform the development of new therapeutic strategies.

Personalized Treatment Suggestion for Severe Hyponatremia Patients(with Maine Medical Center). This project aims to develop causal machine learning models to identify and recommend optimal treatment strategies for patients with severe hyponatremia. Maine Medical Center provides a unique opportunity to translate these AI tools into clinical practice, including potential evaluation through prospective clinical studies. The project will also incorporate large language models (LLMs) to extract and integrate information from unstructured clinical notes.

Gestational Weight Retention and Diabetes Research (with Maine Medical Center and Harvard Medical School) This project aims to identify pregnant women at high risk of progressing from gestational diabetes and postpartum weight retention to long-term diabetes and persistent weight retention using clinical and metabolomics data. The project will leverage foundation models and few-shot learning approaches to improve predictive performance and evaluate model generalizability in small-sample, high-dimensional biomedical datasets.

Uncertainty Quantification for AI models. This methodological project addresses an important unmet need in clinical AI applications. In real-world healthcare settings, multiple factors contribute to uncertainty in predictive models, including missing data, measurement variability, and model uncertainty. This project aims to develop principled approaches, such as Bayesian methods, to rigorously quantify predictive uncertainty in clinical AI models.

Requirements

· PhD in biomedical Engineering, Data Science, Applied Math, Computational biology, Computer Sciences, biostatistics, medical informatics or a related field.

· Proficiency in Python (optionally in R), Linux, deep learning (Pytorch, Tensorflow), machine learning, High performing cluster, GPU computing.

· Strong expertise in AI and/or biomedical fields.

· Excellent communication skills with collaborators with different background including experimentalist and clinicians, highly collaborative, creative, a strong passion in translation research

· Strong Critical thinking skills

Responsibilities

· Develop novel, robust and reproducible AI and computational tools in the area described above. And/or develop generalizable AI framework and computational methodology that benefits field described above.

· Publish scientific contributions in Journals and Conferences.

· Collaborate with clinical and biological partners to understand the needs and develop novel computational tools

· Mentor junior lab members, providing mentoring in relevant fields.

· Work with PI to develop new emerging research directions and contribute to the grants.

Application

Interested candidates please email your cover letter, resume, 3 referees and a short statement (<=1 page) including your research interest, experience and career goal to Qingchu.Jin@mainehealth.org and qjin.jobapp@gmail.com. MaineHealth application portal will be available soon.