Postdoctoral Appointee - AI Co-Scientists
Argonne National Laboratory is seeking a highly motivated Post-Doctoral Researcher to develop and advance the IDeA co-scientist project. The role involves creating AI-powered autonomous research assistants to transform biological research through intelligent systems that collaborate in the scientific process.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement generative AI models and agentic systems capable of scientific reasoning and hypothesis generation in biological contexts
- Develop and integrate tool-calling frameworks that enable AI agents to interact with bioinformatics software, computational modeling platforms, databases, and experimental systems
- Build scalable architectures for multi-agent systems that can coordinate complex research workflows across computational and experimental domains
- Create feedback mechanisms that allow AI co-scientists to learn iteratively from experimental results, simulation outputs, and literature
- Implement prompt engineering strategies, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and knowledge graph integration for scientific reasoning
- Develop evaluation frameworks and benchmarks to assess the performance of AI co-scientists in biological discovery tasks
- Collaborate with experimental biologists, computational scientists, and engineers to identify use cases and validate AI-driven discoveries
- Optimize system performance for deployment on high-performance computing infrastructure and cloud platforms
- Publish findings in high-impact journals and present research at leading AI and computational biology conferences
- Contribute to open-source tools and frameworks that advance the broader AI-for-science community
Skills
- Completed or Soon-to-be-completed Ph.D. within the last 0-5 years in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, or a related field
- Strong programming skills in Python, with experience in AI/ML frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, Hugging Face Transformers)
- Experience developing or working with large language models (LLMs), agentic systems, or autonomous AI agents
- Demonstrated ability to integrate AI systems with external tools, APIs, databases, or software packages
- Understanding of biological systems, bioinformatics workflows, or computational biology applications
- Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work on open-ended research questions
- Excellent communication skills and ability to work collaboratively in interdisciplinary teams
- Strong publication record or demonstrated potential in relevant fields
- Ability to model Argonne's core values of impact, safety, respect, integrity and teamwork
- Experience with agentic AI architectures, including ReAct, Chain-of-Thought reasoning, or multi-agent systems
- Familiarity with tool integration frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGPT, or similar platforms
- Knowledge of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector databases, and knowledge graph integration
- Background in systems biology, genomics, protein engineering, or drug discovery
- Familiarity with high-performance computing environments and scalable distributed systems
- Knowledge of bioinformatics tools and databases (BLAST, UniProt, PDB, KEGG, etc.)
- Experience with API development, microservices, and/or container architectures (Singularity)
Benefits
- Competitive salary
- Professional development opportunities
- Funding for conference travel
Company Overview