Position Description

Maxwell Postdoctoral Fellows

Engineering Innovations in Medicine (EIM) &
The Center for Data Science for Enterprise and Society 
Cornell University  

In conjunction with Cornell’s Engineering Innovations in Medicine (EIM) initiative and the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering, the Center for Data Science for Enterprise & Society at Cornell University seeks to recruit Maxwell Postdoctoral Fellows; these are one- or two-year postdoctoral positions that were made possible by the gift of alumnus Dev Joneja, PhD ‘89.  Maxwell Fellows provide a bridge to enhance collaboration among faculty developing cutting edge tools in data science and in biomedical research, potentially spanning the Cornell College of Engineering, Weill Cornell Medicine, and Cornell Tech.

The goal of the Engineering Innovations in Medicine initiative is to advance biological discovery, develop new diagnostic tools, and deploy new therapeutics by integrating data science, engineering, and medicine. Specifically, the mission is to pioneer cutting-edge engineering principles that will fundamentally change the way biomedical data is acquired, computed, and used and to develop, validate, and implement new, data-driven decision-making approaches to advance human health. Maxwell Fellows will engage in deeply interdisciplinary research developing and deploying methods from AI, statistics, or operations research to address challenges in medicine or biotechnology.

The Center for Data Science for Enterprise & Society aims to unify programs and curricula in data science across a wide spectrum of application domains, including computational social science (e.g., sociology and government), the economics/computer science interface, the aspects of digital agriculture in the production and management of agriculture, digital platforms supporting urban infrastructure (e.g., the sharing economy), and as a theme that is cross-cutting in many of these areas, the corresponding issues of privacy, security, and fairness. The areas highlighted are meant to serve only as illustrative; candidates for the Maxwell postdoctoral Fellowship are sought from all areas of research that advance the state of the art in data science and the health sciences, extending the reach of data-driven research into novel medical application domains.    

To illustrate the desired interdisciplinary nature of the research, one example project could be AI methods for developing personalized cancer combination therapies, wherein combinations of chemotherapy drugs are chosen based on adaptively-chosen cell viability experiments and genomic testing performed in the lab on cells taken from a cancer patient. An AI method would use published research and historical data to guide experimentation toward quickly identifying a safe and effective combination of drugs for the patient. Success in such a project would require a working knowledge of concepts from biology, common experimentation workflows, and the ability to read related scientific papers on cancer combination therapy. It would also require expertise in relevant AI methodology, such as deep learning architectures for property prediction in chemistry and biology, approaches for extracting relevant information from foundation models, and/or methods for adaptive experimental design such as active learning or Bayesian optimization.

Applicants should submit their curriculum vitae (CV) and research statement summarizing their accomplishments to date; they must also submit a two-page description of proposed research for the period to be spent at the Center, including two proposed faculty mentors at Cornell; these can be any Cornell faculty members , and collectively have expertise that span both some relevant area from a health science/biomedical technology domain as well as a core data science domain (typically, one for the former domain and one for the latter); two letters of recommendation as well as a letter of support from each Cornell faculty mentor. Applicants must contact the appropriate faculty directly in advance to ensure their support of their application.   Candidates will be required to show proof of their Ph.D. prior to the start of this position, and to have already done substantial research in areas relevant to the Center and their research proposal. 

For full consideration, applications should be completed by December 10, 2025 . Offers will be made to accommodate a start date within the calendar year 2026, potentially as early as January 16, 2026.