Job Summary

Category: Post-doctoral Positions and Fellowships
Institution: The University of Texas, Austin
Department: Computer Science
Duration: 1 year; funding is available to support renewal based on performance
Location: Austin, TX
Priority application date: May 1, 2025 (for full consideration)

Job Description

The NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins (CosmicAI) seeks highly qualified candidates (within three years of the award of their PhD) for a postdoctoral position with the Explorable Universe research group. Appointments will begin Fall 2025, with a term of 1 year with the possibility of renewal. Read more about the institute and its mission here.

This postdoctoral fellow position will perform research with the Explorable Universe team on developing next-generation generative AI copilots and agents to aid astronomy research, inclusive of text and/or multimodal foundational models. Successful candidates will be appointed within the Department of Computer Science at UT Austin, and co-supervised by the team of Greg Durrett, Jessy Li, and Matthew Lease. Applicants will be reviewed on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Expected responsibilities will include:

• Write and review manuscripts for publication in peer-reviewed conferences and journals, with a focus on NLP/ML/HCI-related venues (e.g., *CL, COLM, EMNLP, ICLR, NeurIPS, CHI, CSCW, IUI, UIST, etc).

• Present research findings, both internally and in public forums.

• Engage in collaborative research within UT Austin and across CosmicAI-affiliated universities and labs.

• Mentor students in research.

• Contribute to grant writing efforts.

• Organize seminars, workshops, and other research-related activities.

• Advance collaborative projects with CosmicAI’s partner organizations, such as the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2).

Compensation and Benefits

• Compensation Type: Salary

• Stipend: $75,000

• Included Benefits: Information about benefits can be found here.

Required Qualifications

• Ph.D. earned within the last three years centered on natural language processing, machine learning, or a closely-related field.

• Productive, self-driven, and collaborative scholar with a strong publication track record.

• Good communication skills and ability to convey research ideas to a broad audience.

Application Details

• Compile the following required documents into a single PDF, name the file Firstname_Lastname, and submit via email or drag-n-drop into the widget below.

  • Cover letter (1-page speaking to the applicant’s fit to this call)

  • Curriculum vitae

  • Research statement

  • Contact information for two potential letter writers