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