Post-Doctoral Associate - Pickering Lab

Posting Number: G/R32483P

Working Title: Post-Doctoral Associate - Pickering Lab

Department: CAES-Crop & Soil Sciences

Chartered by the state of Georgia in 1785, the University of Georgia is the birthplace of public higher education in America and is the state’s flagship university (https://(Use the "Apply for this Job" box below).). The proof is in our more than 240 years of academic and professional achievements and our continual commitment to higher education. UGA is currently ranked among the top 20 public universities in U.S. News & World Report.

The University’s main campus is located in Athens, approximately 65 miles northeast of Atlanta, with extended campuses in Atlanta, Griffin, Gwinnett, and Tifton. UGA employs approximately 3,100 faculty and more than 7,700 full-time staff. The University’s enrollment exceeds 41,000 students including over 31,000 undergraduates and over 10,000 graduate and professional students. Academic programs reside in 19 schools and colleges, including our newly established School of Medicine.

Employment Type: Employee

Additional Schedule Information: Monday through Friday 8AM-5PM. Occasional travel for conferences.

Advertised Salary: Commensurate with Experience

Anticipated

Start Date:

06/01/2026

Posting Date: 03/19/2026

Open Until Filled: Yes

Location of Vacancy: Athens Area

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Develop Agentic AI systems for agricultural design & prediction

• Architect agent workflows (data/literature ingestion → modeling → evaluation → iteration) for genomics and crop modeling.
• Foundation-model or representation-learning approaches for genotype/sequence/omics; uncertainty-aware prediction; decision support for selection.
• Hybrid mechanistic + learned models; neural ODEs / constrained learning; spatiotemporal modeling across G×E×M.

Percentage of time: 70

Create benchmarks, datasets, and evaluation protocols

• Reproducible benchmarks across crops, environments, and tasks; rigorous ablations; robustness + generalization testing.

Percentage of time: 15

Career development & scholarly dissemination

• Papers, talks, open-source releases, mentoring students, and participating in interdisciplinary collaborations.

Percentage of time: 15

Agentic AI is rapidly changing nearly every domain, from academia to industry. Agriculture is no different. These postdoctoral opportunity will look to research and build agentic scientific AI systems that can design, predict, and optimize agricultural outcomes—across crops, environments, and management regimes. We are seeking a Postdoctoral Associate to develop the next generation of Agentic AI for Agricultural Design and Prediction
, spanning:

• Genomics agents that assemble AI-native genomic prediction and selection models (e.g., DNA foundation-models, GNN/sequence architectures for breeding decisions, pangenomic models).
• Crop Growth Model agents that create AI-native crop…