AI in Business, Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Position Summary

The James Silberrad Brown Center for Artificial Intelligence (JSB AI Center) seeks a full‑time Research Fellow to play a central role in advancing its interdisciplinary AI research agenda. The role is designed for a technically strong researcher who can provide leadership and continuity across multi‑stage research projects while contributing to the Center’s long‑term growth and external funding strategy.

The JSB AI Center brings together faculty, students, and collaborators from business, information systems, engineering, computer science, communication, psychology, and related fields. Research areas include foundation models, multimodal learning, social robotics, AI for education and healthcare, behavior modeling, and trustworthy human–AI interaction. The Center’s mission is to connect cutting‑edge AI innovation with meaningful applications in business, management, health, and society.

The Research Fellow will lead and contribute to collaborative research streams while developing an independent research program aligned with Center priorities. Responsibilities include managing experimental design and execution, contributing to high‑impact publications, mentoring students, and playing a significant role in external grant development.

• Design and lead independent and collaborative research projects in multimodal AI, foundation models, social robotics, and applied AI.
• Develop and manage experiments using the Center’s high‑performance computing systems with clear documentation and reproducible workflows.
• Contribute to model development integrating audio, vision, language, and sensor data for embodied and socially intelligent systems.
• Drive publication output from concept development through submission to leading venues.

• Co‑lead development of federal, foundation, and industry grant proposals, including technical narratives, research design, and budgets.
• Support grant reporting, deliverables tracking, and coordination across interdisciplinary teams.
• Strengthen the Center’s long‑term research capacity through sustained external funding efforts.

• Mentor undergraduate and graduate students in experiment design, technical implementation, and scientific writing.
• Facilitate collaboration across modeling, robotics, information systems, and applied research teams.
• Coordinate with engineering partners to ensure research outputs support real‑world deployment.

• Publish in leading AI, technical, and business journals and conferences.
• Present research to academic, industry, and community audiences.
• Contribute to applied research partnerships in education, healthcare, and community settings.

• Ph.D. in Management Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, Robotics, Cognitive Science, or a related field (completed or expected by start date).

• Experience with deep learning frameworks, especially PyTorch, and with high‑performance computing environments.
• Experience with multi‑GPU training and distributed computing workflows.
• Evidence of peer‑reviewed publications or manuscripts under review.
• Strong research writing skills and experience contributing to manuscripts or proposals.
• Commitment to collaboration, student mentorship, and active engagement in daily JSB AI Center activities.
• Experience with multimodal learning, vision‑language models, audio or speech processing, or large language models is preferred.
• Familiarity with fine‑tuning methods such as LoRA, PEFT, and QLoRA, and with experiment tracking tools such as Weights and Biases or MLflow is preferred.
• Background in AI for education, healthcare, mental health, or social behavior modeling is preferred.
• Experience with self‑supervised learning approaches, including contrastive learning or masked prediction methods is preferred.
• A track record of contributing to successful grant proposals is preferred.
• Experience mentoring or coordinating student research teams is preferred.

Anticipated hiring range: $65,000–$67,500.

San Diego State University offers a rich benefits package that constitutes a major portion of total compensation. Full benefits include:

• Generous time off: 15 paid…