NLP & Scientific Integrity Post-Doc

NovaGen Research Fund • Rockville, MD

3h

About The Position

NGRF (NovaGen Research Fund) is a new data science collaboration hub including multiple labs and centers. NGRF is seeking a researcher to join the LLM Lab and contribute to NGRF’s scientific discovery platform. This role combines original research in scientific integrity with hands-on development of NLP and AI capabilities on a large-scale biomedical data platform. The researcher will work with a multi-terabyte curated literature database, develop and evaluate NLP models, build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and contribute to a federated knowledge graph that models scientific claims and evidence relationships. The role spans research and engineering — publishing peer-reviewed findings while building the models and pipelines that power NGRF’s platform.

Requirements

• PhD in natural language processing, computational linguistics, computer science, information science, or a related field
• Publication record in NLP, text mining, or computational approaches to scientific literature
• Strong programming skills in Python with experience in modern ML/NLP frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers)
• Experience working with large text corpora and large-scale datasets
• Familiarity with vector databases, embeddings, semantic search, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
• Experience with knowledge graphs, ontology design, or graph databases
• Demonstrated ability to design and execute independent research projects
• Strong written and oral communication skills

Nice To Haves

• Background in scientometrics, bibliometrics, or research integrity
• Experience with scientific publishing APIs and metadata (DOIs, PubMed, CrossRef, OpenAlex)
• Familiarity with claim extraction, relation extraction, or scientific argument mining
• Proficiency with Git, GitHub, and collaborative software development workflows
• Experience with Linux/Unix environments and command-line tools
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and CI/CD pipelines
• Experience with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot)
• Experience deploying NLP models in production or near-production settings
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, or cloud platforms (AWS)
• Experience with SQL databases (PostgreSQL) and data modeling
• Track record of interdisciplinary collaboration

Responsibilities

• Scientific integrity research: Design and execute large-scale computational analyses of scientific publishing practices across the biomedical literature. Publish findings in peer-reviewed venues (e.g., Scientometrics, JASIST, Quantitative Science Studies).
• NLP model development: Develop and validate models for semantic analysis of scientific text — including claim extraction, relevance scoring, and relationship detection. Build on existing RAG infrastructure and vector search capabilities.
• Big data and pipeline engineering: Work with a multi-terabyte literature database and external APIs (PubMed, CrossRef, OpenAlex) to build scalable data processing and analysis pipelines. Integrate structured and unstructured data sources into reproducible workflows.
• Collaboration and outreach: Work with external partners in the research integrity community. Present findings at conferences and contribute to NGRF’s visibility in the scientific integrity space.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree