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Young Investigator, Open Language Models for Biology

Ai2· Research
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Seattle, WA$159.7kpostdoctoralPosted 2mo ago

About the role

Postdoctoral researcher to work on the CellOLMo project, integrating open language models with single-cell brain data to address biological questions, with a focus on grounding models in biological knowledge and releasing code, data, and model weights openly.

Responsibilities

  • Develop a multimodal language model that combines single-cell gene-expression data with text, using an open model such as OLMo.
  • Reproduce and evaluate relevant approaches, including scGPT, Geneformer, CellWhisperer, and C2S-Scale.
  • Adapt and improve these approaches for brain and neurodegeneration data.
  • Design controlled experiments to test whether language grounding improves performance over cell-only and text-free baselines.
  • Develop representations at the brain-region and donor levels that incorporate pathology and disease progression.
  • Evaluate models on held-out donors using measures such as cell-type and marker recovery, agreement with known patterns of regional vulnerability, and expert review of plain-language answers.
  • Work with Allen Institute scientists to interpret results and identify predictions suitable for experimental follow-up.
  • Release data, code, and model weights, and prepare the results for publication.

Qualifications

  • A completed PhD, or a PhD expected within one year, in machine learning, computational biology, computational neuroscience, physics, or a related quantitative field.
  • Hands-on experience training or fine-tuning transformer-based language models.
  • Strong Python and PyTorch skills.
  • Experience writing reliable, reproducible research code.
  • The ability to carry out independent research on open-ended problems.
  • The ability to communicate clearly with both machine-learning researchers and biological scientists.

Skills

Required:Transformer-based language modelsPythonPyTorchReproducible researchIndependent researchCommunication
Nice to have:Single-cell genomics (preferred)Scanpy / AnnData / scVI

Benefits

  • Team members and their families are covered by medical, dental, vision, and an employee assistance program.
  • Enrollment flexibility for health savings account, healthcare reimbursement arrangement, and health care and dependent care flexible spending accounts.
  • Enrollment in the company’s 401k plan.
  • $125 per month to assist with commuting or internet expenses and $200 per month for fitness and wellbeing expenses.
  • Up to ten sick days per year, up to seven personal days per year, up to 20 vacation days per year and twelve paid holidays per year.
  • Annual bonuses.
Last updated Oct 21, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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Ai2, founded by Paul Allen and led by Ali Farhadi, conducts high-impact research and engineering to tackle key problems in artificial intelligence.

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