Postdoctoral Associate

Duke Careers • Durham, NC

2d • Onsite

About The Position

Duke University School of Medicine is seeking a Postdoctoral Associate for the Lafata Lab. This role is within a highly collaborative and innovative research environment dedicated to advancing translational science through computational pathology, biomedical engineering, and clinical research. The associate will work alongside multidisciplinary teams of scientists, clinicians, engineers, and data experts, contributing to impactful NIH-funded research programs, including active clinical trials, while helping shape the future of precision medicine and tissue microenvironment analysis. The position requires creativity, curiosity, and scientific rigor to drive new discoveries that improve patient care and deepen the understanding of complex diseases.

Requirements

• A PhD in Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, Medical Physics, Computational Biology, Data Science, or a related quantitative discipline.
• Experience in computational image analysis, digital pathology, machine learning, or biomedical data science.
• Strong programming and software development skills.
• Experience working with complex biomedical, imaging, or clinical research datasets.
• Excellent scientific communication, collaboration, and problem-solving abilities.
• A passion for advancing healthcare research through innovative computational methods.

Responsibilities

• Lead the laboratory's computational digital pathology initiatives and develop next-generation analytical approaches to characterize tissue immune microenvironments across oncologic and non-oncologic disease models.
• Design, implement, and maintain advanced quantitative image analysis pipelines for whole-slide tissue imaging.
• Extract spatial, morphological, and clinically relevant biomarkers to support multi-institutional NIH-funded research and clinical trial activities.
• Ensure robust, scalable, and reproducible computational workflows.
• Create novel computational models and spatial statistical methodologies to characterize tissue architecture.
• Quantify immune cell organization, cell-to-cell interactions, and microenvironment dynamics.
• Advance the understanding of disease processes through innovative spatial analysis techniques.
• Bridge computer engineering, machine learning, and translational biomedical science.
• Develop modular software tools, simulation frameworks, and machine learning pipelines to support biomarker discovery and validation.
• Contribute to cross-cohort analyses that accelerate translational research outcomes.
• Oversee data ingestion, quality assurance, and standardization of imaging and clinical datasets from collaborating institutions.
• Support large-scale clinical trial operations through rigorous data management practices.
• Foster reproducibility and consistency across complex multi-site research programs.
• Lead the development of peer-reviewed scientific publications and scholarly presentations.
• Present findings at national and international scientific conferences.
• Contribute innovative methodologies, preliminary results, and technical expertise to competitive grant proposals and future funding initiatives.

What This Job Offers

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