BDC Post-Doc Research Associate

UNC-Chapel Hill • Chapel Hill, NC

5d

About The Position

The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at UNC Chapel Hill is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate to contribute to innovative projects within the NIH BioData Catalyst (BDC) ecosystem, a cloud-based platform that provides secure access to biomedical data, analytic tools, and collaborative workspaces. This position offers the opportunity to work on cutting-edge initiatives aimed at improving how researchers interact with complex data and analysis workflows. Potential project areas include developing semantic search capabilities to help users efficiently locate relevant datasets, designing natural language interfaces for more intuitive navigation of the BDC environment, creating BDC-specific foundation models, and enabling large language models (LLM) and machine learning-based workflows within the platform. The role may also involve advancing harmonization techniques to improve data interoperability and usability across the ecosystem. This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to high-impact, translational research infrastructure at the intersection of biomedical informatics, cloud computing, and AI.

Requirements

• Experience deploying and working with LLMs
• Agentic workflows and retrieval augmented generation (RAG)
• Prompt engineering experience
• Developing, training, and testing machine learning (ML) models
• Software engineering expertise

Nice To Haves

• Experience with biomedical data, including clinical, EHR, omics, and imaging
• Knowledge graphs (KGs), and integrating LLMs with KGs
• Multimodal LLMs

Responsibilities

• Develop semantic search capabilities to help users efficiently locate relevant datasets.
• Design natural language interfaces for more intuitive navigation of the BDC environment.
• Create BDC-specific foundation models.
• Enable large language models (LLM) and machine learning-based workflows within the platform.
• Advance harmonization techniques to improve data interoperability and usability across the ecosystem.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level