Postdoctoral Research Fellow – AI in Mental Health & Cancer Care

About the role

The University of British Columbia, in partnership with BC Cancer and SOZO Intuition Systems, is seeking a Mitacs Postdoctoral Fellow to advance AI-driven solutions for mental health and cancer care. The 12‑month full‑time appointment will be split between the Nunez Laboratory and the SOZO team, focusing on building data pipelines and AI tools on SOZO’s proprietary platform.

Key responsibilities

• Design, implement and maintain scalable pipelines for ingesting and transforming diverse biological and clinical datasets.
• Develop AI components that enrich and reason over life‑science data using large language models.
• Manage storage and retrieval of biological entities with vector databases and PostgreSQL.
• Collaborate with data scientists, software engineers, and medical trainees to create analytical tools and an AI chat interface.
• Contribute to research publications and present findings within the Nunez Lab and partner institutions.

Required profile

• PhD in Computer Science, Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Biomedical Engineering or a related field.
• Strong background in data engineering and machine learning applied to health or life‑science data.
• Experience working in interdisciplinary teams and publishing research.

Required skills

• Data pipeline development
• Large language model (LLM) integration
• Vector database management
• PostgreSQL
• Clinical natural language processing (NLP)
• Generative AI and retrieval‑augmented generation

What we offer

• Competitive salary of $50,000 CAD per year with benefits.
• Access to cutting‑edge AI platforms and biomedical datasets.
• Mentorship from leading researchers in psychiatry, oncology and AI.
• Potential for a one‑year renewal based on performance and funding.