Research Fellow - Cardiovascular Medicine - Cardiovascular AI

About the job

Why Mayo Clinic

Mayo Clinic is top-ranked in more specialties than any other care provider according to U.S. News & World Report. As we work together to put the needs of the patient first, we are also dedicated to our employees, investing in competitive compensation and comprehensive benefit plans – to take care of you and your family, now and in the future. And with continuing education and advancement opportunities at every turn, you can build a long, successful career with Mayo Clinic.

Benefits Highlights

• Medical: Multiple plan options.
• Dental: Delta Dental or reimbursement account for flexible coverage.
• Vision: Affordable plan with national network.
• Pre-Tax Savings: HSA and FSAs for eligible expenses.
• Retirement: Competitive retirement package to secure your future.

Responsibilities

Dr. Chieh-Ju Chao's team, based in the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine and the Mayo AI Lab, has an opening for a postdoctoral research fellow in cardiovascular artificial intelligence. The individual will train in Dr. Chao's research program and work closely with faculty of the Mayo Clinic Echocardiography Laboratory.

The team develops AI for echocardiography and multimodal cardiovascular data and takes it from model development into clinical deployment. The team is supported by the NIH/NHLBI and the Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics and has an active research collaboration with Stanford University. Fellows have access to one of the largest echocardiography archives in the world, dedicated GPU computing, and a clinical team that runs AI tools in day-to-day echo lab practice. Current research areas include:

•Vision-language models for echocardiography: foundation and multimodal large language models, developed through large-scale training, post-training, and reinforcement learning, that read echocardiographic videos and produce quantitative measurements and clinical interpretations.

•Agentic AI systems: AI agents that coordinate imaging models, clinical data, and software tools to support physicians in echocardiographic interpretation and reporting.

•Clinical deployment and prospective evaluation: bringing AI into the Mayo echo lab workflow, running reader studies and prospective studies of physician and AI interaction, and monitoring how models perform in practice.

•Multimodal patient representation and cardiac digital twins: combining echocardiography, cardiac imaging, and electronic health record data to model disease course and predict outcomes.

Responsibilities

•Design, train, and evaluate deep learning models and agentic AI systems, including vision-language models, on large-scale echocardiographic video and clinical data, using supervised training, post-training, and reinforcement learning.

•Build evaluation benchmarks and run internal and external validation studies.

•Contribute to clinical deployment studies, including data pipelines, performance monitoring, and statistical analysis.

•Lead first-author manuscripts and present at cardiology and machine learning meetings (e.g., AHA, ACC, ASE, MICCAI, NeurIPS).

•Contribute to grant applications and work with engineers, cardiologists, and sonographers on a multidisciplinary team.

The following is required for completeness of application:

•Current curriculum vitae with bibliography

•Proof of doctoral degree (copy of diploma or final transcript with English translation, if applicable) or a letter from your university's Registrar office indicating you have fulfilled all doctoral program requirements and are eligible to graduate.

• Please also be prepared that you may be asked to provide three letters of recommendation to the hiring PI

A Research Fellow at Mayo Clinic is a temporary position intended to provide training and education in research. Individuals will train in the research program of a Mayo Clinic principal investigator. Qualified individuals will demonstrate the potential for research as evidenced by their training and peer-reviewed publications and should become competitive for national research grants. Upon background check and CCATS Executive Committee approval, Research Fellow may have patient/research subject contact directly relating to and incidental to the original research program. Proof of English proficiency is required for J-1 Short-Term Scholars, Research Scholars, Professors, Specialists, and Student Interns sponsored by Mayo Clinic.

Qualifications

• PhD in computer science, electrical or biomedical engineering, statistics, or a related quantitative field, or an MD with substantial computational research experience.
• Strong programming skills in Python and PyTorch, and hands-on experience training deep learning models on GPU clusters.
• Experience with cloud computing for machine learning, preferably Google Cloud Platform (GCP), such as Vertex AI, Compute Engine GPU instances, and Cloud Storage.
• First-author peer-reviewed publications in AI or machine learning, in journals or at conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, MICCAI).

Preferred:

• Experience with multimodal models, large language models, or vision-language models, including training, fine-tuning, and post-training.
• Experience with reinforcement learning for model post-training (e.g., RLHF, policy optimization methods, reward design).
• Experience building LLM-based agents with tool use.
• Experience with medical imaging or video data (DICOM experience is a plus).
• Experience with distributed training and HPC environments.
• Familiarity with cardiovascular imaging is helpful but not required.

Exemption Status

Exempt

Compensation Detail

$71,992.20 - $84,220.50 / year; Education, experience and tenure may be considered along with internal equity when job offers are extended.

Benefits Eligible

Yes

Schedule

Full Time

Hours/Pay Period

80

Schedule Details

Monday - Friday

Weekend Schedule

As Needed

International Assignment

No

Site Description

Just as our reputation has spread beyond our Minnesota roots, so have our locations. Today, our employees are located at our three major campuses in Phoenix/Scottsdale, Arizona, Jacksonville, Florida, Rochester, Minnesota, and at Mayo Clinic Health System campuses throughout Midwestern communities, and at our international locations. Each Mayo Clinic location is a special place where our employees thrive in both their work and personal lives. Learn more about what each unique Mayo Clinic campus has to offer, and where your best fit is.

Equal Opportunity

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, protected veteran status or disability status. Learn more about the "EOE is the Law".  Mayo Clinic participates in E-Verify and may provide the Social Security Administration and, if necessary, the Department of Homeland Security with information from each new employee's Form I-9 to confirm work authorization.

Recruiter

Kara Schott