Research Associate - AI & Audio for Respiratory Health

Diversity Dashboard; Sheffield; Hybrid; GBP 39,000 - 42,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual leave

Generous pension

Flexible working

Staff development

Job summary

University of Sheffield is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate to lead machine learning research on acoustic foundation models for respiratory health within LungSight. You will work with large-scale speech, breathing and cough data, developing robust self-supervised and transformer-based approaches, and contribute to multimodal integration with visual and clinical information.

The role offers opportunities for high-quality publications, collaboration across multiple universities, and

Qualifications

• PhD (or equivalent) in computer science, electronic engineering, speech/audio processing, machine learning, biomedical engineering or related field.
• Strong research experience in machine learning or deep learning with Python using PyTorch.
• Experience in speech, audio, acoustic signal processing or related time-series analysis.
• Knowledge of self-supervised learning, foundation models or Transformer-based architectures.
• Ability to design rigorous experiments and evaluate model robustness and generalisability.
• Evidence of communicating research through publications or reports.
• Ability to work independently within a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional team.
• Strong organisational skills and reproducible code/data management.

Responsibilities

• Develop and evaluate domain-adapted acoustic foundation models for respiratory health using speech, breathing and cough recordings.
• Curate and analyse large-scale real-world audio datasets in secure environments.
• Investigate state-of-the-art self-supervised learning approaches and transformer architectures.
• Fine-tune and validate models on labeled datasets and assess clinical utility.
• Collaborate with clinicians and researchers across institutions to integrate multimodal data.
• Lead research publications and presentations; support student supervision.

Skills

Python

Transformer models

Multimodal ML

Research publications

Education

PhD or equivalent

Tools

PyTorch

Job description

University of Sheffield is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate to lead machine learning research on acoustic foundation models for respiratory health within LungSight. You will work with large-scale speech, breathing and cough data, developing robust self-supervised and transformer-based approaches, and contribute to multimodal integration with visual and clinical information.

The role offers opportunities for high-quality publications, collaboration across multiple universities, and