Postdoctoral Researcher

UHN is Canada’s #1 hospital and the world’s #1 publicly funded hospital. With 10 sites and more than 44,000 TeamUHN members, UHN consists of Toronto General Hospital, Toronto Western Hospital, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, The Michener Institute of Education and West Park Healthcare Centre. As Canada's top research hospital, the scope of biomedical research and complexity of cases at UHN have made it a national and international source for discovery, education and patient care. UHN has the largest hospital-based research program in Canada, with major research in neurosciences, cardiology, transplantation, oncology, surgical innovation, infectious diseases, genomic medicine and rehabilitation medicine. UHN is a research hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto.

UHN’s vision is to build A Healthier World and it’s only because of the talented and dedicated people who work here that we are continually bringing that vision closer to reality.

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Position Summary:
We are seeking a postdoctoral researcher with strong expertise in AI/ML to join a major interdisciplinary initiative focused on developing foundation models and secure computational infrastructure for translational cancer research.

The first major objective is to build a general-purpose drug foundation model capable of transfer learning across diverse prediction tasks, including mechanism of action classification, clinical drug response prediction in tumour subtypes, ADMET and toxicity profiling, combinatorial drug synergy, and drug repurposing. The goal is to move beyond task-specific architectures and datasets toward flexible models that can generalize across therapeutic contexts.

The second major objective is to develop and apply secure, scalable, and privacy-preserving computational infrastructure to support biomarker discovery across diverse treatment modalities. This will include building agentic AI approaches to harmonize clinical, genomic, and transcriptomic data across public and private cohorts, while assessing the predictive value of DNA and RNA signatures in federated settings where sensitive data remain under local governance.

Together, these efforts aim to advance AI-driven drug discovery, biomarker development, and clinical translation by integrating modern machine learning, multimodal biomedical data, and robust distributed analysis frameworks. The successful candidate will work in the Haibe-Kains Lab at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network.

Duties:

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Please be advised that a Criminal Record Check may be required of the successful candidate. Should it be determined that any information provided by a candidate be misleading, inaccurate or incorrect, UHN reserves the right to discontinue with the consideration of their application.

UHN is an equal opportunity employer committed to an inclusive recruitment process and workplace. Requests for accommodation can be made at any stage of the recruitment process. Applicants need to make their requirements known.

We thank all applicants for their interest, however, only those selected for further consideration will be contacted.