Postdoctoral Research Associate: Clinical NLP with Open LMs

University-of-Liverpool; Liverpool; On-site; GBP 38,000 - 48,000; Full time

Job summary

The University of Liverpool is seeking a capable researcher to take day-to-day technical ownership of Work Package 5, Task 5.1 for the AIM-SAFE Horizon Europe project. You will benchmark and select open-weight Small Language Models for clinical NLP and design efficient fine-tuning pipelines, within a reproducible MLOps framework, for NHS deployment.

You will collaborate with KAIST and Knowledgator teams, publish in high-impact venues, and mentor junior researchers in the Intelligent Systems

Responsibilities

• Benchmarking and selecting open-weight Small Language Models for clinical NLP tasks such as entity recognition and drug-interaction reasoning
• Designing parameter-efficient fine-tuning pipelines (LoRA, QLoRA, adapters) within a reproducible MLOps framework
• Applying quantisation (GPTQ, AWQ, GGUF/llama.cpp) for CPU-feasible NHS deployment
• Integrating federated and privacy-preserving learning via the CAFEIN platform at CERN
• Embedding the RUC2 clinical safety governance layer
• Leading Deliverable D5.1
• Acting as technical liaison with the KAIST-led multi-agent orchestration team and the Knowledgator-led RAG team
• Publishing in high-impact venues and mentoring junior researchers

Job description

The University of Liverpool is seeking a capable researcher to take day-to-day technical ownership of Work Package 5, Task 5.1 for the AIM-SAFE Horizon Europe project. You will benchmark and select open-weight Small Language Models for clinical NLP and design efficient fine-tuning pipelines, within a reproducible MLOps framework, for NHS deployment.

You will collaborate with KAIST and Knowledgator teams, publish in high-impact venues, and mentor junior researchers in the Intelligent Systems