Post-Doctoral Associate - Pickering Lab

Post-Doctoral Associate - Pickering Lab

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Position Details

• Posting Number: G/R32483P
• Working Title:
  
  Post-Doctoral Associate - Pickering Lab
• Department: CAES-Crop & Soil Sciences
• About the University of Georgia:
  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. UGA is ranked among the top 20 public universities in U.S. News & World Report. The main campus is in Athens, 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 the School of Medicine.
• College/Unit/Department Website: (provided in posting)
• 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
• Closing Date:
  Open Until Filled
• Location of Vacancy:
  Athens Area

EEO Statement

The University of Georgia is an Equal Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, color, disability, genetic information, national origin, race, religion, sex, or veteran status or other protected status. Persons needing accommodations or assistance with the accessibility of materials related to this search are encouraged to contact Central HR (hrweb).

USG Core Values

The University System of Georgia is comprised of 25 institutions of higher education and learning, and the USG Statement of Core Values includes Integrity, Excellence, Accountability, and Respect. More details on the USG Core Values and Code of Conduct are available in USG Board Policy

• Develop Agentic AI systems for agricultural design and 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.
• Create benchmarks, datasets, and evaluation protocols
  • Reproducible benchmarks across crops, environments, and tasks; rigorous ablations; robustness + generalization testing.
• Career development & scholarly dissemination
  • Papers, talks, open-source releases, mentoring students, and participating in interdisciplinary collaborations.

• Position Information
• Classification
  
  Title:
  
  Post-Doctoral Associate
• AD, FLSA:
  Exempt
• Job Code: FTE 1.00

Minimum Qualifications

Agentic AI is rapidly changing nearly every domain, from academia to industry. This postdoctoral opportunity will research and build agentic scientific AI systems that can design, predict, and optimize agricultural outcomes—across crops, environments, and management regimes. We seek 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 growth models—including BINNs and hybrid dynamical systems that fuse mechanistic constraints with large-scale data.
• Scientific agent workflows that can ingest literature + datasets, propose modeling choices, run experiments, quantify…