Postdoctoral Fellowship: AI for Chemistry Agents

The Reading to Learn Lab at the University of Waterloo seek a postdoctoral researcher to develop and evaluate intelligent agents for chemistry. In partnership with industry partners, you will advance multimodal models that transform how chemists access data, reason over experiments, and plan workflows. This is a fully funded position with guaranteed funding up to 3 years.

Why Join Us?

• Work at the cutting edge of AI for chemical research and have the opportunity to lead your own research agenda
• Collaborate directly with industry scientists on real-world evaluations
• Publish open-source benchmarks, models, and evaluation pipelines
• Mentor graduate students within a vibrant interdisciplinary team

What You’ll Do

• Foundation models: build multimodal reasoning agents for reaction protocols, property tables, safety data and images
• Sample-efficient test-time adaptation: Develop tool-use agents that autonomously invoke professional and proprietary applications and software
• Deep research agent: integrate modules into an end-to-end research assistant and refine it via feedback from domain experts

What You’ll Gain

• Expertise in SOTA retrieval, vision-language QA, and tool-augmented language agents
• Hands-on experience translating lab workflows into AI-driven assistants
• Opportunities to publish at premier ML and NLP venues
• Connections across academia and industry

Your Background

• PhD in Chemistry, Chemical Informatics or a related natural-science field
• Familiarity with multimodal ML, retrieval systems or AI-driven tool interfaces
• Strong programming skills (Python, PyTorch/TensorFlow)
• Strong communication skills

To apply, please complete an application. We look forward to exploring your fit for this exciting opportunity.