Rice University is seeking a visionary AI leader to push the frontiers of space exploration, secure satellite systems, and advance next-generation healthcare by designing and deploying breakthrough AI systems for lunar missions, satellite cybersecurity, and AI-powered medical diagnostics.
Requirements
- End-to-end AI/ML R&D in time-series/telemetry, anomaly detection, forecasting, and evaluation under class imbalance
- Hands-on work with mission/safety-critical (spacecraft/ground telemetry) and/or clinical datasets
- Cloud ML on Microsoft Azure (Azure ML/AI Foundry, Data Lake/Blob, Synapse/Databricks); reproducible MLOps, model versioning/monitoring
- Scientific/Technical Mastery: AI/ML (supervised/unsupervised, deep learning and reinforcement learning), time-series telemetry, anomaly/event detection, error analysis, experimental design
- Aerospace Simulation & Telemetry: NASA NOS3 mission simulation, subsystem integration, fault injection/validation; spacecraft and ground-segment telemetry pipelines
- Space Systems Cybersecurity: Working knowledge of SPARTA and NIST frameworks; translating threat models/TTPs into data-driven detection and response analytics
- GenAI & LLMs: RAG pipelines, domain adaptation/fine-tuning, safe prompt/response patterns, integration into mission workflows and documentation
Responsibilities
- Inventing and deploying AI/ML solutions to enhance spacecraft telemetry, anomaly detection, and mission performance optimization.
- Building cyber-resilient space systems aligned with SPARTA and NIST frameworks.
- Leading healthcare AI projects that enable precise detection of cardiovascular diseases.
- Architecting and scaling AI platforms using Azure, GPUs, TPUs, and NASA-grade tools.
- Integrating Generative AI and fine-tuned LLMs into both aerospace and healthcare systems.
- Architect secure, cloud-based ML systems (ingestion → features → modeling → validation → serving/monitoring) on Azure, ensuring reproducibility and governance.
- Develop anomaly detection/forecasting for spacecraft and ground telemetry; design evaluation aligned to mission alerting/operational needs.
Other
- Doctoral degree
- 2+ years of postdoctoral experience
- Collaboration with multidisciplinary teams; mentoring students/junior engineers
- Completion of required university research compliance trainings (e.g., CITI/IRB; HIPAA/PHI where applicable) and institutional cybersecurity/data-handling trainings within standard onboarding timelines
- Ability to work with sensitive/export-controlled data per sponsor and institutional policy
