Junior Research Group Leader “AI and NLP for Mental Health”

Are you interested in doing cutting-edge research on Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and AI for Mental Health? Should your research have real-world impact in fighting mental disorders that are among the most common and serious illnesses? Please join our diverse and interdisciplinary team to tackle some of the hardest and most exciting research challenges including representation learning and multimodality among other topics.

The Department of Computer Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt is looking for a Junior Research Group Leader (equivalent to an assistant professor level) as part of DYNAMIC, the newly approved interdisciplinary LOEWE-funded center “Dynamic Network Approach of Mental Health to Stimulate Innovations for Change”. TU Darmstadt is one of several partners in DYNAMIC. It investigates the question of how to improve mental illness diagnostics and therapy based on AI. Potential topics include but are not limited to AI, NLP and knowledge discovery for mental health, large language models for clinical applications and multimodal clinical data analysis. Within DYNAMIC, we expect the successful candidate to work on the research area TP1.4: Language analysis of therapist-patient conversations.

The research position is funded from 1.10.2024 until 31.12.2027 with a possibility of extension if further funds are granted in the 2nd phase of DYNAMIC or otherwise. It will contribute to the new Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S) being founded at the Goethe University of Frankfurt and to the Hessian.AI Center with its headquarters at the TU Darmstadt. We expect that professorships will be advertised in C3S offering future career perspectives to the Junior Research Group Leader. Thus, the position will enable an excellent junior faculty to develop a strong research profile and achieve qualifications required for a tenured professorship. In the Department of Computer Science, the Junior Research Group will closely collaborate with the research labs led by Prof. Iryna Gurevych and Prof. Kristian Kersting. Further collaboration opportunities exist with the labs of Prof. Marcus Rohrbach, Prof. Anna Rohrbach, Prof. Carsten Binnig and others.

The candidate should fulfill the following requirements: an excellent PhD degree in AI, NLP or related field (up to 4 years after the PhD), international research track-record, interest and skills in advising students, teaching and project management. Prior experience in clinical NLP as well as multimodal data analysis is beneficial but not obligatory. The successful candidate will receive start-up funds for a full time research assistant (about 65k p.a.) and will be able to apply for flexible research funds within DYNAMIC.

The application documents (CV, PhD certificate, publication list, motivation letter, research and teaching statement) should be submitted to Prof. Iryna Gurevych iryna.gurevych (at) tu-darmstadt (dot) de by January 31st, 2024 at latest. The short-listed candidates will then participate in the selection process of the Department.