The Postdoctoral Associate will perform research and develop software tools in Bioinformatics, working on drug discovery related applications particularly the CAND multiscale drug discovery platform developed by the Division of Bioinformatics at the University at Buffalo:

• Integrating the CANDO drug discovery platform with LLM-based reasoning models to build a specialized AI agent for drug discovery.
• Enhance existing protocols for compound-protein interaction and/or binding affinity prediction within the CANDO platform.
• Enhance and integrate a network of biological/chemical entities to predict properties or activities.
• Modularize key components of the CANDO platform for more efficient integration with proposed CANDO AI agent.

Duties will include, but are not limited to:

• Performing independent and/or mentored informatics research to aid the development of the software tools.
• Presenting research tool capabilities to the scientific community at national conferences and other scientific meetings.
• Preparing and submitting research tool development/findings for peer reviewed publication.
• Co-developing CANDO software regularly with current primary developers in the Samadrala group.
• Assisting with the training of individuals seeking to use the software tools.
• Creating and disseminating text or video tutorials for the software.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

• PhD in Biomedical Informatics or a related field, such as, Computer science, Statistics, computational biology, or computational Chemistry.
• Strong interest in Bioinformatics and/or Cheminformatics.
• Experience working in computational drug discovery, particularly multiscale applications.
• Experience working in Python and Bash.
• Understanding of machine/deep learning topics.
• Demonstrated analytical and critical thinking abilities.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Advanced Python and Bash programming Skills.
• Proven experience developing and applying AI models, especially for Bioinformatics or cheminformatics applications.
• Experience with fine-tuning and/or developing LLMs.
• Experience developing multiscale pipeline-or platform-level software for drug discovery, especially the CANDO platform.
• Deep understanding of drug discovery and development process and how software can be integrated at every stage.

• Performing independent and/or mentored informatics research to aid the development of the software tools.
• Presenting research tool capabilities to the scientific community at national conferences and other scientific meetings.
• Preparing and submitting research tool development/findings for peer reviewed publication.
• Co-developing CANDO software regularly with current primary developers in the Samadrala group.
• Assisting with the training of individuals seeking to use the software tools.
• Creating and disseminating text or video tutorials for the software