Postdoctoral Associate

Position Summary:

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is seeking a Postdoctoral Associate for the Division of Acute Care Surgery at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.

The Postdoctoral Associate will work under the direction of the Principal Investigator in building a first-of-its-kind Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) that predicts, detects, and manages SSIs by fusing RGB + thermal wound images, intraoperative video, OR traffic signals, EHR data, and patient/surgeon surveys with explainability and equity at its core.

• Design and train vision–text transformer architectures for multimodal fusion (RGB + thermal, intraoperative video, OR signals, EHR, surveys); develop temporal and cross-attention components for longitudinal risk trajectories.
• Build robust fairness and skin-tone–aware pipelines (Fitzpatrick spectrum robustness, augmentation, bias audits). Partner with annotation teams using Encord (video) and our Segment Care image labels; shape active-learning loops and QC.
• Productionize models with PyTorch, Docker/Kubernetes, and AWS/SageMaker Prepares manuscripts for publications.
• Ensure all members of the lab are in compliance with the necessary trainings (both at the lab and at the institutional level).

Minimum Education and Experience:

• A PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical/Computer Engineering, or a related field by the start date, with a strong publication record in computer vision, multimodal learning, or vision–language models.
• We require hands-on expertise with transformer architectures (e.g., ViT/TimeSformer, CLIP/BLIP or similar) in PyTorch, including scalable training on GPUs and reproducible experimentation.
• Demonstrated experience building explainable models (e.g., concept bottlenecks, prototype/contrastive methods, attribution) and evaluating calibration and uncertainty is essential.

Physical Demands and Work Environment:

• Physical Demands: The applicant needs to be physically capable of performing the above duties, including use of multiple monitors, high-performance computers, and specialized software. Extended periods of sitting at desks or workstations equipment. Occasional lifting of equipment (typically under 25 lbs). He/She should communicate his/her research plans and findings verbally and in writing in proper English to the team and to the scientific community in presentations and publications.
• Work Environment: Moderate noise. Office/lab environment.