Please send a cover letter explaining your background, relevant experience, and specific fit for our lab and this project, a CV, and three names of references to Pedro.PinheiroChagas@ucsf.edu.
The NeuroAI Lab at UCSF, led by Prof. Pedro Pinheiro-Chagas, and the UCSF Brain Health Registry, led by Prof. Rachel Nosheny, invite applications for a postdoctoral position focused on designing and developing conversational AI agents for neurology and healthcare. The successful candidate will join a multidisciplinary team at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and cognitive neuroscience, with the aim to advance discovery, diagnosis, and care of neurodegenerative diseases. The fellow will lead the development of voice-based conversational AI systems for scalable clinical assessments, cognitive screening, patient monitoring, and care delivery. Current projects include AI-administered clinical interviews such as the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) — a crucial tool for assessing the severity and progression of dementia — in collaboration with Michael W. Weiner, M.D., with additional applications spanning clinical data collection, symptom tracking, and patient-facing health interactions across neurology.
The fellow will design and build generative AI systems featuring advanced agentic pipelines, speech-to-speech conversational interfaces, leveraging prompt engineering and alignment techniques to optimize reliability, transparency, and safety across clinical applications. Key responsibilities include: architecting end-to-end conversational AI workflows, rigorous benchmarking with real and simulated users, developing automated scoring and analysis pipelines, and maintaining security and regulatory compliance within HIPAA-compliant platforms. The candidate will advance AI alignment by ensuring model outputs robustly serve clinical intent and patient well-being, actively minimizing risks such as hallucinations and potential adverse events through continuous evaluation, testing, and iterative system refinement. The fellow will also disseminate research through conferences and publications, contributing to both the AI and clinical neuroscience fields.
The NeuroAI Lab is directed by Pedro Pinheiro-Chagas, PhD, and operates at the UCSF Edward and Pearl Fein Memory and Aging Center (MAC) in the Department of Neurology of the Weill Institute for Neurosciences. The lab is also affiliated with the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute and the Center for Intelligent Imaging (ci2). The UCSF Brain Health Registry (BHR), led by Rachel Nosheny, PhD, is an internet-based platform for recruitment, assessment, and longitudinal monitoring of participants for neuroscience studies, with over 100,000 registered participants. The BHR enables large-scale remote cognitive assessment and clinical trial recruitment for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, and other brain disorders. This joint environment provides the postdoctoral fellow with direct access to world-class clinical collaborators, deeply phenotyped patient cohorts, large-scale participant registries, and cutting-edge computational infrastructure. The fellow will benefit from close co-mentorship by Dr. Pinheiro-Chagas and Dr. Nosheny, along with senior collaborators across neurology, psychiatry, and neuropsychology, with opportunities to present at international conferences, lead publications, and develop an independent research profile. The UCSF Fein MAC is one of the premier dementia research centers in the world, offering an exceptionally rich and collaborative environment for translational neuroscience and clinical AI research.