Research Fellow - Cardiovascular Medicine - Cardiovascular AI

Mayo Clinic • Rochester, MN

9d • $71,992 - $84,221

About The Position

Dr. Chieh-Ju Chao’s team in the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine and Mayo AI Lab is seeking a postdoctoral research fellow in cardiovascular artificial intelligence. The fellow will train in Dr. Chao’s research program and work closely with faculty in the Mayo Clinic Echocardiography Laboratory.

The team develops AI for echocardiography and multimodal cardiovascular data, moving systems from model development into clinical deployment. Its work is supported by the NIH/NHLBI and the Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics, and includes an active research collaboration with Stanford University. Fellows have access to a large echocardiography archive, dedicated GPU computing, and a clinical team that uses AI tools in day-to-day echo lab practice.

Research areas include vision-language and multimodal models for echocardiographic videos; agentic AI systems that coordinate imaging models, clinical data, and software tools; clinical deployment and prospective evaluation of AI in the Mayo echo lab; and multimodal patient representations and cardiac digital twins combining echocardiography, cardiac imaging, and electronic health record data.

A Research Fellow at Mayo Clinic is a temporary position intended to provide research training and education under a Mayo Clinic principal investigator. Qualified candidates should demonstrate research potential through their training and peer-reviewed publications and should become competitive for national research grants. Following a background check and CCATS Executive Committee approval, the fellow may have patient or research-subject contact directly related to and incidental to the original research program. Proof of English proficiency is required for certain Mayo Clinic-sponsored visa categories.

Requirements

• PhD in computer science, electrical or biomedical engineering, statistics, or a related quantitative field, or an MD with substantial computational research experience.
• Strong programming skills in Python and PyTorch.
• Hands-on experience training deep learning models on GPU clusters.
• Experience with cloud computing for machine learning; Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including Vertex AI, Compute Engine GPU instances, and Cloud Storage, is preferred.
• First-author peer-reviewed publications in AI or machine learning journals or conferences, such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, or MICCAI.
• Current curriculum vitae with bibliography.
• Proof of doctoral degree, such as a diploma or final transcript with English translation if applicable, or a university Registrar letter confirming completion of doctoral requirements and eligibility to graduate.
• Be prepared to provide three letters of recommendation to the hiring PI if requested.
• Proof of English proficiency is required for J-1 Short-Term Scholars, Research Scholars, Professors, Specialists, and Student Interns sponsored by Mayo Clinic.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with multimodal models, large language models, or vision-language models, including training, fine-tuning, and post-training.
• Experience with reinforcement learning for model post-training, such as RLHF, policy optimization methods, or reward design.
• Experience building LLM-based agents with tool use.
• Experience with medical imaging or video data; DICOM experience is a plus.
• Experience with distributed training and HPC environments.
• Familiarity with cardiovascular imaging; helpful but not required.
• Experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), such as Vertex AI, Compute Engine GPU instances, and Cloud Storage.

Responsibilities

• Design, train, and evaluate deep learning models and agentic AI systems, including vision-language models, using large-scale echocardiographic video and clinical data and supervised training, post-training, and reinforcement learning.
• Build evaluation benchmarks and conduct internal and external validation studies.
• Contribute to clinical deployment studies, including data pipelines, performance monitoring, and statistical analysis.
• Lead first-author manuscripts and present at cardiology and machine learning meetings such as AHA, ACC, ASE, MICCAI, and NeurIPS.
• Contribute to grant applications and collaborate with engineers, cardiologists, and sonographers on a multidisciplinary team.

Benefits

• Medical insurance with multiple plan options.
• Dental coverage through Delta Dental or a reimbursement account for flexible coverage.
• Vision plan with a national network.
• HSA and FSAs for eligible expenses.
• Competitive retirement package.
• Competitive compensation and comprehensive benefit plans.
• Continuing education and advancement opportunities.

What This Job Offers

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