Postdoctoral Fellow, Open Call

Postdoctoral Fellowships at Basis offer an immersive research environment for highly qualified researchers to deepen their expertise in computational theories of intelligence, including but not limited to reasoning, learning, and decision-making. Fellows will work closely with Basis Research Scientists and partnering Principal Investigators (PIs) from academic institutions.

Basis is a nonprofit applied AI research organization with two mutually reinforcing goals.

The first is to understand and build intelligence. This means to establish the mathematical principles of what it means to reason, to learn, to make decisions, to understand, and to explain; and to construct software that implements these principles.

The second is to advance society’s ability to solve intractable problems. This means expanding the scale, complexity, and breadth of problems that we can solve today, and even more importantly, accelerating our ability to solve problems in the future.

To achieve these goals, we’re building both a new technological foundation that draws inspiration from how humans reason, and a new kind of collaborative organization that puts human values first.

• Basis Postdoctoral Fellows are jointly mentored and funded by Basis and partner PIs at academic institutions. Fellows split their time between Basis and the academic PI’s lab, functioning like a jointly advised postdoctoral position.

  • Established partner PIs include: Nada Amin (Harvard), Kevin Ellis (Cornell), Armando Solar-Lezama (MIT), Youssef Marzouk (MIT), and Tom Silver (Princeton).

• Each Fellow is paired with a Basis mentor selected to align with the Fellow’s research program and goals.

  • Possible Basis mentors include: Emily Mackevicius, Zenna Tavares, Eli Bingham, Matt Levine, and others.

• This structure offers a distinctive research environment that blends the strengths of academia and industry. Fellows have the autonomy to shape their own research agendas while benefiting from mentorship, collaboration, and resources from both settings.

• There are two pathways into the Fellowship: joining an existing project or proposing a new research direction through our open call.

• Postdoctoral Fellows may be offered a full-time Research Scientist position at Basis, contingent upon performance and organizational needs.

• We ask that you suggest three or more potential PIs you would be interested in working with in your cover letter. These might be people you’ve been in contact with before, or not. If you do have a relationship or have discussed your project ideas with them before, let us know. The eventual project collaborator is not required to come from this list.

• Applicants may apply to both, if desired.

• Established team calls do not require submission of a Research Plan, as they are positioned within an existing Basis research area and are already internally and/or externally funded.

• Established team calls are likely to move faster, for the same reasons.

Non-Discrimination Notice
Basis Research Institute provides equal employment opportunities without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or genetics and prohibits discrimination based on all protected characteristics.

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