AI in Business, Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Position Summary

The James Silberrad Brown Center for Artificial Intelligence (JSB AI Center) seeks a full-time Research Fellow to play a central role in advancing its interdisciplinary AI research agenda. This position is designed for a technically strong researcher who can provide leadership and continuity across multi-stage research projects while contributing to the Center's long-term growth and external funding strategy.

The JSB AI Center brings together faculty, students, and collaborators from business, information systems, engineering, computer science, communication, psychology, and related fields. Research areas include foundation models, multimodal learning, social robotics, AI for education and healthcare, behavior modeling, and trustworthy human-AI interaction. The Center's mission is to connect cutting-edge AI innovation with meaningful applications in business, management, health, and society.

The Research Fellow will lead and contribute to collaborative research streams while developing an independent research program aligned with Center priorities. This role includes managing experimental design and execution, contributing to high-impact publications, mentoring students, and playing a significant role in external grant development.

Key Responsibilities

Research Leadership

• Design and lead independent and collaborative research projects in multimodal AI, foundation models, social robotics, and applied AI.
• Develop and manage experiments using the Center's high-performance computing systems with clear documentation and reproducible workflows.
• Contribute to model development integrating audio, vision, language, and sensor data for embodied and socially intelligent systems.
• Drive publication output from concept development through submission to leading venues.

Grant Development & Program Growth

• Co-lead development of federal, foundation, and industry grant proposals, including technical narratives, research design, and budgets.
• Support grant reporting, deliverables tracking, and coordination across interdisciplinary teams.
• Strengthen the Center's long-term research capacity through sustained external funding efforts.

Mentorship & Collaboration

• Mentor undergraduate and graduate students in experiment design, technical implementation, and scientific writing.
• Facilitate collaboration across modeling, robotics, information systems, and applied research teams.
• Coordinate with engineering partners to ensure research outputs support real-world deployment.

Dissemination & Impact

• Publish in leading AI, technical, and business journals and conferences.
• Present research to academic, industry, and community audiences.
• Contribute to applied research partnerships in education, healthcare, and community settings.

This is a full-time (1.0 time-base), benefits eligible, temporary position. The duration of the fellowship is one year. This position is designated as exempt under FLSA and is not eligible for overtime compensation.

Department Summary

The JSB AI Center maintains a high-performance computing environment that includes GPU clusters, large-memory servers, and an NVIDIA DGX B200 system. These resources support the training of large multimodal models involving audio, video, language, nonverbal behavior, affective features, facial expressions, movement, and other sensor data. Experience with multi-GPU training, distributed computing, and efficient experiment management is important for this role.

The JSB AI Center's computing infrastructure supports research on socially intelligent robots, multimodal behavior modeling, education and healthcare support systems, and other AI applications that involve adaptive, context-sensitive interaction. Current projects include behavioral modeling for mental health indicators, educational support through goal-directed robot communication, self-supervised speech and audio modeling, and the development of robots capable of interpreting and responding to verbal and nonverbal signals.

For more information regarding the James Silberrad Brown Center for AI, click here.

Education and Experience

• Ph.D. in Management Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, Robotics, Cognitive Science, or a related field (completed or expected within six months of start date)

Key Qualifications

• Experience with deep learning frameworks, especially PyTorch, and with high-performance computing environments
• Experience with multi-GPU training and distributed computing workflows
• Evidence of peer-reviewed publications or manuscripts under review
• Strong research writing skills and experience contributing to manuscripts or proposals
• Commitment to collaboration, student mentorship, and active engagement in daily JSB AI Center activities
• Experience with multimodal learning, vision-language models, audio or speech processing, or large language models is preferred.
• Familiarity with fine-tuning methods such as LoRA, PEFT, and QLoRA, and with experiment tracking tools such as Weights and Biases or MLflow is preferred.
• Background in AI for education, healthcare, mental health, or social behavior modeling is preferred.
• Experience with self-supervised learning approaches, including contrastive learning or masked prediction methods is preferred.
• A track record of contributing to successful grant proposals is preferred.
• Experience mentoring or coordinating student research teams is preferred.

Compensation and Benefits

Anticipated hiring range: $65,000-$67,500

Salary placement is determined by the education, experience, and qualifications the candidate brings to the position, internal equity, and the hiring department's fiscal resources.

San Diego State University offers a rich benefits package that constitutes a major portion of total compensation. For more information regarding SDSU benefits, please click here.

Full Benefits Package Includes:

• Generous Time Off: 15 paid holidays, vacation, and sick leave.
• Retirement: CalPERS pension plan with retiree healthcare, and reciprocal agreements with other California public retirement systems, including the UC.
• Health Coverage: Medical, dental, and vision options at low or no cost.
• Education Support: CSU tuition fee waiver for employees and eligible dependents.
• Optional Offerings: FlexCash, life and disability insurance, legal and pet plans.
• Campus & Community: Access to the library, campus events, employee groups, and volunteer and social activities.