Target Fellow; Postdoctoral Researcher – Community Benchmarking & Critical Assessment

Target 2035 Fellow (Postdoctoral Researcher – Community Benchmarking & Critical Assessment)
Supervisor(s):
Position 1:  Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling (University of Toronto), Pablo Meyer (IBM Research) and Gustavo Stolovitzky (NYU Langone) |  Position 2:  John Moult (University of Maryland) and Matthieu Schapira (SGC)

Program:  Mitacs Accelerate – Target 2035 Fellows

Location:

Toronto, Canada

Position Overview
Two Target 2035 Fellowships are available at the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) in Toronto within BEACON (Benchmarking, Evaluation & Assessment Consortium). BEACON is a new organization with the mission of accelerating science through open community critical assessment and benchmarking. The research program builds on successful community initiatives such as CASP, CAGI, and DREAM, and develops new frameworks for rigorous, transparent, and faster biological discovery.

These positions are funded under the Mitacs-supported Target 2035 Fellows program, part of the global Target 2035 open‑science mission to generate high‑quality datasets and chemical tools to enable AI‑driven drug discovery.

The Fellows will work with BEACON members and international collaborators to:

Develop new benchmarking and evidence assessment methods, including in areas where no clear ground truth exists

Design and run community critical assessment challenges

Advance evaluation frameworks for biological science and AI‑enabled discovery

Initial challenge areas include:

Mechanisms by which specific genetic variants increase Alzheimer’s disease risk (in collaboration with Hugging Face)

Ligand–protein interaction prediction central to drug design

DNA-encoded library challenges in collaboration with CACHE and Target 2035

Additional areas under development, including structural biology of cell machinery, scientific literature assessment, virtual cell biology, and n-of‑1 science

Qualifications
Applicants should have a PhD in a relevant field and a strong interest in improving rigor, transparency, and evaluation standards in science. Experience in computational biology, machine learning, structural biology, genetics, or related quantitative disciplines is desirable.

Appointment, Training Program, and Research Environment
The fellowship is a full-time postdoctoral appointment for an initial one-year term, renewable for up to two additional years, subject to performance and program requirements.

As a Target 2035 Fellow, you will be embedded in a collaborative, international open‑science ecosystem and contribute to the benchmarking infrastructure that underpins next‑generation AI‑driven biomedical research.

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