Postdoctoral Associate

Rutgers University • New Brunswick, NJ

51d • Onsite

About The Position

New Jersey's academic health center, Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences (RBHS) takes an integrated approach to educating students, providing clinical care, and conducting research, all with the goal of improving human health. Aligned with Rutgers University-New Brunswick and collaborating university wide, RBHS includes eight schools, a behavioral health network, and five centers and institutes that focus on cancer treatment and research, neuroscience, advanced biotechnology and medicine, environmental and occupational health, and health care policy and aging research. Our faculty are teachers, clinicians, and scientists with unparalleled experience who advance medical innovation and provide patient care informed by the latest research findings. We offer an outstanding education in medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, public health, nursing, biomedical research, and the full spectrum of allied health careers. Our clinical and academic facilities are located throughout the state-at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, including Piscataway; and at locations in Newark, Scotch Plains, Somerset, Stratford, and other locations. Clinical partners include Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, Newark's University Hospital in Newark, and other affiliates. Through this community of healers, scientists, and scholars, Rutgers is equipped as never before to transform lives. Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is seeking a Postdoctoral Associate for the Division of Acute Care Surgery at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. The Postdoctoral Associate will work under the direction of the Principal Investigator in building a first-of-its-kind Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) that predicts, detects, and manages SSIs by fusing RGB + thermal wound images, intraoperative video, OR traffic signals, EHR data, and patient/surgeon surveys with explainability and equity at its core.

Requirements

• A PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical/Computer Engineering, or a related field by the start date, with a strong publication record in computer vision, multimodal learning, or vision-language models.
• We require hands-on expertise with transformer architectures (e.g., ViT/TimeSformer, CLIP/BLIP or similar) in PyTorch, including scalable training on GPUs and reproducible experimentation.
• Demonstrated experience building explainable models (e.g., concept bottlenecks, prototype/contrastive methods, attribution) and evaluating calibration and uncertainty is essential.
• Strong software engineering skills-Python, Git, unit testing, experiment tracking-and fluency with containerization (Docker) and basic cloud workflows are expected, alongside excellent communication and cross-disciplinary collaboration with clinical teams.

Nice To Haves

• The applicant should have training and experience in molecular and cellular neurobiology including animal husbandry, immunohistochemistry on brain tissue, and Western blotting and biochemical assays on brain tissue lysates.
• S/he should also be able to operate standard laboratory equipment such as centrifuges, culture hoods, incubators, PCR machines, shaking incubators and plate readers.

Responsibilities

• Design and train vision-text transformer architectures for multimodal fusion (RGB + thermal, intraoperative video, OR signals, EHR, surveys); develop temporal and cross-attention components for longitudinal risk trajectories.
• Build robust fairness and skin-tone-aware pipelines (Fitzpatrick spectrum robustness, augmentation, bias audits). Partner with annotation teams using Encord (video) and our Segment Care image labels; shape active-learning loops and QC.
• Productionize models with PyTorch, Docker/Kubernetes, and AWS/SageMaker Prepares manuscripts for publications.
• Ensure all members of the lab are in compliance with the necessary trainings (both at the lab and at the institutional level).

Benefits

• Medical, prescription drug, and dental coverage
• Paid vacation, holidays, and various leave programs
• Competitive retirement benefits, including defined contribution plans and voluntary tax-deferred savings options
• Employee and dependent educational benefits
• Life insurance coverage
• Employee discounts programs

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Industry: Educational Services
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees