Postdoctoral Research Scholar

The Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) at NC State University is a nationally recognized leader in materials discovery, design and deployment. Our faculty, students and staff work at the forefront of innovation: advancing materials that enable breakthroughs in energy, electronics, health, manufacturing and sustainability.

Research in MSE spans theory, computation, synthesis, characterization and scale-up, supported by a collaborative culture and state-of-the-art facilities on NC State’s Centennial Campus. Faculty lead internationally visible efforts in areas such as artificial intelligence-driven materials design, wide bandgap semiconductors, energy storage, nanomaterials, soft and biomaterials and structural materials under extreme environments.

Representative labs include:

Learn how NC State MSE is leading the way to discover, create and enhance the world around us.

Primary duties and responsibilities of this position include:
Machine Learning Model Development:
Design, implement, and optimize machine learning algorithms to enhance or develop new force fields for molecular simulations. Focus on leveraging modern techniques such as neural networks, Gaussian processes, and transfer learning to improve predictive accuracy and computational efficiency.

Data Analysis & Preprocessing:
Gather and preprocess large-scale simulation and experimental data. Identify key features, perform dimensionality reduction, and ensure the data is properly formatted for training machine learning models.

Simulation & Benchmarking:
Conduct molecular dynamics and quantum mechanical simulations to generate training and validation datasets. Benchmark newly developed models against existing force fields and experimental results to assess performance and reliability.

Collaboration & Publication:
Work closely with interdisciplinary teams of computational chemists, materials scientists, and biophysicists to apply machine learning models to a variety of systems. Publish results in high-impact journals and present findings at relevant conferences.

Software Development & Documentation:
Contribute to the development of open-source software tools and frameworks for machine learning-based force field modeling. Ensure thorough documentation and reproducibility of all work.

Mentorship:
Mentor graduate students and junior researchers in computational techniques, machine learning methodologies, and scientific writing.