Job Description

Academic

Job Category

Faculty Non Bargaining

Job Title

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Department

Talhouk Laboratory | Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology | Faculty of Medicine (Aline Talhouk)

Posting End Date

October 15, 2026

Note:Applications will be accepted until 11:59 PM on the Posting End Date.

Job End Date

November 30, 2027

The expected pay range for this position is $70,000 - $80,000 per year plus benefits.

Postdoctoral Fellow Position in AI-assisted Clinical Informatics and Federated Analysis in Gynecologic Cancers

At UBC, we believe that attracting and sustaining a diverse workforce is key to the successful pursuit of excellence in research, innovation, and learning for all faculty, staff and students. Our commitment to employment equity helps achieve inclusion and fairness, brings rich diversity to UBC as a workplace, and creates the necessary conditions for a rewarding career.

The Uterine Health Research Lab at UBC, led by Dr. Aline Talhouk, is a data-driven research group working at the intersection of uterine health, gynecologic oncology, computational biology, clinical informatics, and artificial intelligence. The lab develops and applies innovative data science and AI approaches to improve cancer prevention, diagnosis, treatment decision-making, and patient outcomes, with a growing focus on personalized medicine and AI-assisted clinical decision support.

Our research integrates clinical, molecular, and real-world data with emerging computational approaches, including large language models, predictive modelling, and multi-omics data integration. The lab coordinates and contributes to large-scale national and international research initiatives and works closely with clinicians, computational scientists, and patient partners to translate research findings into clinically meaningful tools.

The research team is also part of BC's Gynecologic Cancer Initiative, a world-leading interdisciplinary team working together to drive innovative research that transforms how we prevent, diagnose, treat, and improve survivorship care for people with gynecologic cancer.

We are seeking a highly motivated Postdoctoral Fellow with a strong background in health data science, bioinformatics, or artificial intelligence to join the Uterine Health Research Lab. This position offers a unique opportunity to develop and deploy AI-powered analytics infrastructure across gynecologic cancer research initiatives.

The fellow will lead the development of multi-omics data integration, interactive visualization tools, and AI-assisted clinical decision support toolsfor gynecologic cancers.

The fellow will be supervised by Dr. Aline Talhouk and other co-investigators and senior lab members, with access to an international network of clinical and scientific collaborators.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop an interactive visual dashboards and exploratory data analysis tools that enable hypothesis generation and pattern interpretation across multi-omics and clinical data.
• Design and develop an AI-powered analytics dashboard that synthesizes distributed aggregate outputs from an international multi-site research network, enabling clinician-ready interpretation of network-level findings across rare gynecologic cancer subtypes.
• Build and evaluate retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-based large language models (LLMs) pipelines to extract key entities, relationships, and concepts from peer-reviewed literature, clinical trials, and treatment guidelines, and transform these into structured knowledge graphs encoding relationships among histotypes, biomarkers, therapies, and outcomes.

• Assess the accuracy, completeness, and usability of AI-generated outputs, iteratively refining pipelines and methods.

• Conduct iterative co-design with clinicians, member investigators, and patient partners to ensure usability and clinical relevance of developed tools.
• Contribute to manuscripts, grant applications, conference presentations, and knowledge translation activities.
• Mentor junior trainees and research staff within the lab

Required Qualifications

• PhD in computer science, clinical informatics, statistics, or a closely related field, conferred within the past five years.
• Demonstrated experience in health data visualization, interactive dashboard development, or clinical data tool design.
• Excellent programing skills (e.g., Python, R), with hands-on experience in Bash scripting, workflow management (Snakemake), LLMs, text mining, or knowledge graph construction (e.g., LangChain, Hugging Face, Neo4j, or equivalent).
• Experience benchmarking computational tools and interpreting performance metrics.
• Experience with structured and unstructured data, including parsing and processing large document corpora.
• Strong understanding of machine learning or AI methods applied to health or biomedical data.
• Demonstrated ability to assess model outputs, identify gaps, and iteratively refine analytical approaches.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills, including experience contributing to manuscripts or scientific reports.
• Demonstrated ability to work independently and manage complex, multi-partnership projects.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with federated or distributed data systems, privacy-preserving analytics, or multi-site research infrastructure.

• Familiarity with large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, knowledge graphs, or digital twin modeling in a health research context.
• Experience with bioinformatics tools such as SNV calling using Mutect2, Strelka, LoFreq)
• Background in oncology, women's health, or rare disease research.
• Experience collaborating across multidisciplinary and international teams.
• Familiarity with data governance frameworks, research ethics, or data access and sharing agreements in a research context.

Starting salary will be commensurate with experience, in the range of $70,000 - $80,000 per year plus benefits.

Apply through workday only:

· Provide a cover letter (2-page maximum) outlining your interest, potential to contribute, and qualifications/eligibility aligned to the advert above.

· A full CV with publications/contributions to scientific advancement

· Names and contact details for three professional references

We invite applications from qualified candidates who share our commitment to employment equity and inclusive excellence, and we welcome applications from candidates belonging to historically, persistently, or systemically marginalized groups: Indigenous (First Nation, Métis, Inuit) Peoples, racialized persons, persons with disabilities, women, 2SLGBTQIA+ people, and trans and non-binary people.

The University is committed to creating and maintaining an inclusive and equitable work environment for all members of its workforce. An inclusive work environment presumes an environment where differences are appreciated, recognized, and integrated into current structures, planning, and decision-making modes. Within this hiring process we are committed to creating an inclusive and equitable process for all candidates (including but not limited to people with disabilities). Confidential accommodations are available on request. Please contact Lygia Siqueira via email at lygia.siqueira@phc.caIf you have any questions regarding accommodations or accessibility during the recruitment and hiring process or for more information and support, please visit UBC’s Centre for Workplace Accessibility website at https://hr.ubc.ca/health-and-wellbeing/workplace-accessibility/centre-workplace-accessibility or contact the Centre at workplace.accessibility@ubc.ca

With gratitude, we acknowledge that the University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine and its distributed programs, which include four university academic campuses, are located on traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of First Nations Peoples and communities around the province.

Our Vision: To Transform Health for Everyone.

Ranked among the world’s top medical schools with the fifth-largest MD enrollment in North America, the UBC Faculty of Medicine is a leader in both the science and the practice of medicine. Across British Columbia, more than 12,000 faculty and staff are training the next generation of doctors and health care professionals, making remarkable discoveries, and helping to create the pathways to better health for our communities at home and around the world.

The Faculty - comprised of approximately 2,200 administrative support, technical/research and management and professional staff, as well approximately 650 full-time academic and over 10,000 clinical faculty members - is composed of 19 academic basic science and/or clinical departments, three schools, and 24 research centres and institutes. Together with its University and Health Authority partners, the Faculty delivers innovative programs and conducts research in the areas of health and life sciences. Faculty, staff and trainees are located at university campuses, clinical academic campuses in hospital settings and other regionally based centres across the province.

UBC - One of the World's Leading Universities. As one of the world's leading universities, the University of British Columbia creates an exceptional learning environment that fosters global citizenship, advances a civil and sustainable society, and supports outstanding research to serve the people of British Columbia, Canada and the world.

UBC hires on the basis of merit and is committed to employment equity. All qualified persons are encouraged to apply. Equity and diversity are essential to academic excellence. An open and diverse community fosters the inclusion of voices that have been underrepresented or discouraged. We encourage applications from members of groups that have been marginalized on any grounds enumerated under the B.C. Human Rights Code, including sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, racialization, disability, political belief, religion, marital or family status, age, and/or status as a First Nation, Metis, Inuit, or Indigenous person. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadians and permanent residents of Canada will be given priority.