Research Specialist at The University of Chicago in Chicago, IL

Job description

Department PSD Enrico Fermi Institute: Fleming Group About the Department The Enrico Fermi Institute is an interdisciplinary research unit within the Division of Physical Sciences of the University of Chicago. The Institute's activities include the following: string theory and theoretical high-energy physics, experimental high-energy physics, theoretical astrophysics and cosmology, experimental particle astrophysics, infrared and optical astronomy, cosmic microwave background observations, general relativity, and gravitational waves, and cosmochemistry. Job Summary We are seeking a Researcher to work at the intersection of AI/ML, particle physics, and medical physics. The successful candidate will have expertise applying AI/ML in at least one of these areas — particle physics or medical physics — and a willingness to learn new methods and domains and to transfer approaches across them. The role centers on developing modular, acquisition-aware AI foundation models and applying them to large-scale scientific and biomedical imaging data, and is well suited to someone excited to work across disciplines and to contribute to open, reproducible computational resources. A primary focus of the position is developing a modular, acquisition-aware, multimodal AI foundation model designed to be generic to diseases of the brain, learning shared representations across conditions rather than being tied to a single disease. The Researcher will help build the model, assemble and harmonize multimodal brain-imaging datasets, and run the benchmarking and cross-condition transfer experiments at the heart of the project. The Researcher will also contribute to the group’s broader program of developing AI/ML methods for particle physics and the modeling of physical systems — including deep-learning approaches to reconstruction, classification, and analysis of large-scale detector data — and will help transfer modeling advances between the physics and brain-health domains. This position provides research and technical support activities related to scientific research projects, and ensures compliance of research activities with institutional, state, and federal regulatory policies, procedures, directives, and mandates. This position is expected to last approximately one year, with the possibility of extension based on funding. Responsibilities Designs, implements, and trains components of the foundation-model architecture, including modality-specific encoders, cross-modal fusion, acquisition-aware conditioning, and prediction heads. Develops and applies self-supervised training objectives (e.g., masked signal modeling, cross-modal contrastive learning) and knowledge-distillation strategies from existing foundation models. Curates, preprocesses, and harmonizes multimodal data (structural and functional MRI, PET, EEG, and clinical/phenotypic measures) from established repositories such as ADNI, OASIS-3, NACC, and BSNIP, including acquisition-metadata handling and cross-site harmonization. Builds and runs rigorous benchmarking evaluations comparing the model against disease-specific, single-modality, and existing foundation-model baselines, including pre-specified metrics, ablation studies, and cross-cohort generalization tests. Implements and evaluates zero-shot and few-shot transfer of the model across brain conditions (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, ADHD) and characterizes shared computational signatures. Develops AI/ML methods for particle physics and the modeling of physical systems, including deep-learning and generative AI approaches to reconstruction, event classification, simulation and surrogate modeling, and analysis of large-scale detector and experimental data. Adapts and transfers modeling approaches between the particle-physics and brain-health domains, contributing to the group’s cross-domain foundation-model methodology. Contributes to open, reproducible research outputs, including the FAIR benchmark, versioned code releases, co