Research Fellow - Cardiovascular Medicine - Cardiovascular AI

Mayo Clinic • Rochester, MN

9d • $71,992 - $84,221

About The Position

Mayo Clinic’s Department of Cardiovascular Medicine and Mayo AI Lab seeks a postdoctoral research fellow to train in Dr. Chieh-Ju Chao’s research program and work closely with faculty in the Mayo Clinic Echocardiography Laboratory. The team develops artificial intelligence for echocardiography and multimodal cardiovascular data, progressing from model development to clinical deployment. Its work is supported by the NIH/NHLBI and the Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics, and includes an active collaboration with Stanford University. Fellows have access to a large echocardiography archive, dedicated GPU computing, and a clinical team that uses AI tools in routine echocardiography practice.

Research areas include vision-language models for echocardiography; agentic AI systems that coordinate imaging models, clinical data, and software tools; clinical deployment and prospective evaluation of AI in echocardiography workflows; and multimodal patient representations and cardiac digital twins that combine imaging and electronic health record data to model disease and predict outcomes.

The fellow will design, train, and evaluate deep learning models and agentic AI systems; develop evaluation benchmarks and conduct validation studies; contribute to clinical deployment research; lead manuscripts and present research at cardiology and machine learning meetings; contribute to grant applications; and collaborate with engineers, cardiologists, and sonographers. The role is a temporary training and education position in a Mayo Clinic principal investigator’s research program. Qualified fellows are expected to demonstrate research potential through training and peer-reviewed publications and to become competitive for national research grants. Patient or research-subject contact may occur if approved and directly related and incidental to the research program. Proof of English proficiency is required for specified Mayo Clinic-sponsored J-1 visa categories.

Applicants must provide a current curriculum vitae with bibliography and proof of doctoral degree, or an eligible letter from their university Registrar confirming completion of doctoral requirements and eligibility to graduate. Applicants may also be asked to provide three recommendation letters to the hiring principal investigator.

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 in the listed qualification.
• First-author peer-reviewed publications in AI or machine learning journals or conferences.
• Submit a current curriculum vitae with bibliography.
• Provide proof of doctoral degree or a university Registrar letter confirming completion of doctoral program requirements and eligibility to graduate.
• 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.

Responsibilities

• Design, train, and evaluate deep learning models and agentic AI systems, including vision-language models, using large-scale echocardiographic video and clinical data, 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.
• Collaborate with engineers, cardiologists, and sonographers on a multidisciplinary team.

Benefits

• Multiple medical 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