Please send a cover letter describing your interests, 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 Assistant Professor Pedro Pinheiro-Chagas, is seeking a postdoctoral fellow to develop clinical agentic AI systems for neurodegenerative disease diagnosis and care. The successful applicant will join a multidisciplinary team combining expertise in artificial intelligence, clinical neurology, neuropsychology, and radiology, aiming to create next-generation clinical AI tools that affect real-world practice.
The primary project centers on a clinical agentic AI diagnostic system that leverages generative AI to encode domain knowledge and perform clinical reasoning, grounded in scientific literature and empirical databases. This is combined with traditional machine learning models (e.g., linear classifiers) that provide calibrated probability scores and an interpretable layer of diagnostic support. The system mirrors the workflow of a multidisciplinary expert team, producing not only a diagnosis but a complete evidence trail designed to support rather human clinical judgment. In close collaboration with world-class specialists from the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and the Radiology Department, this highly collaborative initiative offers comprehensive mentorship and direct translational impact.
The appointed fellow will spearhead the development, evaluation, and optimization of clinical agentic AI workflows, elaborate dynamic prompt engineering, and implement benchmarking protocols using real and simulated clinical data. Responsibilities include improving accuracy and interpretability, automating multimodal data processing, maintaining full compliance with data security and regulatory standards (HIPAA).
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). This unique positioning at the intersection of clinical neuroscience and AI provides the postdoctoral fellow with direct access to world-class clinical collaborators, deeply phenotyped patient cohorts, and cutting-edge computational infrastructure. The fellow will benefit from close mentorship by Dr. Pinheiro-Chagas and senior collaborators across neurology, neuropsychology, and radiology, 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.