2025 AI-for-Science
Independent Postdoctoral
Fellowship Program

Deadline: February 14, 2025
Virtual info session recording available here

We are launching a Fellowship program for recently graduated researchers who are ready to chart their own scientific path at the intersection of AI and science. As a Fellow, you will have full access to the technologies and infrastructure we have built at FutureHouse, compute resources, our wet lab and support from our internal engineering team to make new discoveries in a scientific field of your choice. We are looking for candidates with clear ideas about the scientific territory they want to explore using AI and the ability to independently lead and execute a research agenda.

Apply now

Update: To address the high volume of questions we've received about the fellowship, we're providing additional clarification:

• ‍Fellows may have multiple academic co-advisors
• Each co-advisor must provide a letter of support
• Advisors can support multiple fellows, providing they can ensure adequate mentorship for each
• Applicants are welcome (and encouraged) to work with co-advisors not listed on our website
• The Fellowship welcomes international applicants and can be conducted at laboratories outside the US
• Current post-doctoral researchers are eligible to apply
• Fellows are employed and paid directly by FutureHouse

What You Will Get

Our mission is to build an AI scientist, or AI systems, that can automate scientific research and accelerate the pace of discovery, so humanity can find cures for disease, solutions for climate change, and other species-accelerating technologies. You will have access to FutureHouse resources, including:

• Our recently released agent PaperQA2, that can retrieve and summarize information from the scientific literature better than humans.
• Other unreleased agents that can design proteins, carry out cloning protocols, do DNA sequence analysis and analyze biomedical data from a variety of different sources, like metagenomic data, single cell data, data from clinical trials, etc.
• Aviary - our internal framework for reinforcement learning on LLM agents.
• Platforms to enable agents to be rapidly prototyped, deployed, and scaled.
• Robust internal datasets for improving and training agents.
• Compute.
• Close access to our software engineering team.
• Our general-purpose wet lab.

About the Fellowship

Fellows will use FutureHouse tools to expand our ability to solve specific problems of their choosing in biology, biochemistry, or a related field. The goal of this Fellowship is to enable brilliant young researchers to use and develop AI agents for scientific research, and to apply them to make new discoveries. We expect fellows to make significant progress towards high impact discoveries and publications in their field through use of AI tools.

We strongly encourage (but do not require) Fellows to secure an academic co-advisor who they can collaborate with to drive their research agenda. You can work with any academic co-advisor(s) you like. You may also propose more than one academic co-advisor or collaborator if it will meaningfully improve your project, for example by including one co-advisor who focuses on AI-for-Science methods and one co-advisor who focuses on specific problems in biology, biochemistry, etc.

What  kinds of projects are we looking for?
‍- Using PaperQA to search the literature at scale to identify starting points for directed evolution experiments, or to scrape a new dataset that can be used to train a specific machine learning model
- Create a data analysis agent on top of our platform to conduct thousands or tens of thousands of simultaneous analyses on a large omics dataset
- Create a protein engineering agent on top of our platform to design proteins for a high-throughput screen

In each case, we would expect that applicants have some specific scientific question they are trying to answer. We are also very interested in tool development projects. If you have an idea about how you could use our tools to invent a new proteomics method, we are very happy to consider that.

If you are proposing to work with an academic co-advisor, including the academics on our list below, that academic co-advisor must provide a letter of support at the application stage attesting to their willingness to participate in the scheme.

A list of academics who are open to serving as co-advisors for Fellows:

• Sukrit Silas (The Silas Lab)
• Ed Boyden (MIT)
• Frances Arnold (Caltech)
• Marinka Zitnik (Harvard)
• Ryan Flynn (Harvard)
• Fei Chen (The Broad Institute)
• Vijay Ramani (Gladstone Institutes / UCSF)
• William Greenleaf (Stanford)
• Will Allen (Stanford)
• Reza Kalhor (Johns Hopkins)
• Jesse Engreitz (Stanford)
• Andreas Schaefer (The Francis Crick Institute)
• Evan Macosko (The Broad Institute)
• Caroline Uhler (The Broad Institute)
• Sanjay Srivatsan (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center)
• Mikhail Shapiro (Caltech)
• Richard Murray (Caltech)
• Pardis Sabeti (The Broad Institute)
• Jeff Clune (University of British Columbia)
• Pranam Chatterjee (Duke)
• Shriya Srinivasan (Harvard)
• Charlie Swanton (Francis Crick Institute)
• Connor Coley (MIT)
• Grant M. Rotskoff (Stanford)
• Randy Bateman (WUSTL)
• Jim Collins (MIT)
• James Fraser (UCSF)
• Sergey Ovchinnikov (MIT)
• Pratyush Tiwary (University of Maryland)
• Xiaojie Qiu (Stanford)
• Ellen Zhong (Princeton University)
• Venkat Viswanathan (University of Michigan)
• Patrick Hsu (UC Berkeley)
• Brian Hie (Stanford)
• Omar Abudayyeh & Jonathan Gootenberg (Harvard)
• Anima Anandkumar (Caltech)
• Debora Marks (Harvard)
• Giovanni Traverso (MIT)
• Jesse Bloom (Fred Hutchinson CRC)
• Hannah Wayment-Steele (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
• Hattie Chung (Yale)
• George Church (Harvard)

You will be employed by and paid by FutureHouse. FutureHouse is a non-profit, 501c3 research organization. As far as we are aware your co-host academic institution will not need budget to host you. FutureHouse will pay 100% of your salary. This arrangement should not require an advance agreement between FutureHouse and the academic institution in question. We expect intellectual property to be shared between FutureHouse and the academic institution in question according to a collaboration agreement that will be negotiated subsequent to Fellow selection and prior to the Fellowship starting. If your co-advisor or their institution have any questions, they can reach out to us at fellows@futurehouse.org