Data Scientist at the BCRP Lab

Champalimaud Foundation; Portugal; On-site; EUR 16,000 - 19,000; Full time

Job summary

Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal invites applications for a Research fellowship in Health Data Science under the Horizon Europe project "ResPECT". The role focuses on multilingual AI, patient communication, and clinical data integration.

The selected fellow will develop and adapt AI models, implement safety and explainability, and contribute to knowledge transfer through papers, talks, and workshops.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field.
• Minimum of 2 years of research experience in digital health and generative AI.
• Experience with Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs).
• Experience with healthcare data environments, including EHR/EMR concepts.

Responsibilities

• Develop multilingual AI models integrating patient narratives, clinical documents, laboratory data, treatments, diagnosis and imaging reports.
• Build knowledge fusion and summarisation pipelines for burden classification and personalised clinical summaries.
• Implement explainability and safety mechanisms including source referencing and bias monitoring.
• Develop patient interaction modules adapting communication to emotional burden and health literacy.
• Prepare federated learning deployment across partner sites and secure API integration for clinical systems.

Skills

Digital health

Generative AI

LLMs

VLMs

Chatbots

Python

Clinical data

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Tools

Python

HL7 FHIR

Job description

Organisation/Company Champalimaud Foundation Research Field Computer science Technology Researcher Profile Recognised Researcher (R2) Positions Bachelor Positions Application Deadline 19 Oct 2026 - 17:00 (Europe/Lisbon) Country Portugal Type of Contract Other Type of Contract Extra Information Fellowship Job Status Full-time Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme? Horizon Europe Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No

Offer Description

A Call for one Research fellowship for Health Data Scientist is open at Fundação D. Anna de Sommer Champalimaud e Dr. Carlos Montez Champalimaud (Champalimaud Foundation) in the context of the project entitled “ResPECT”, with reference “101287711” from the call Nº “HORIZON-HLTH- 2025-01”, funded by the: European Comission.

Important Note: Any contract should remain subject to the signing of the Consortium Agreement and should not be formalised until this has taken place.

The selected candidate will:

Scientific Description
Fundação Champalimaud is developing an integrated multilingual AI framework under the Horizon Project “Respect” to support personalised, explainable, and safe patient communication in clinical settings. The system will combine clinical data interpretation, knowledge fusion, burden classification, adaptive interaction, emotional analysis, physician-like voice communication, federated learning, and secure API integration.
The framework will process heterogeneous clinical and patient-related data to generate traceable summaries, confidence-based outputs, and patient-adapted explanations. It will also support real-world deployment through privacy-preserving federated learning, HL7 FHIR-compatible APIs, and scientific dissemination activities such as papers, presentations, classes, and workshops.

Work Plan
1. Develop and adapt multilingual AI models capable of integrating patient narratives, clinical documents, laboratory data, treatments, diagnosis, and imaging reports into coherent and clinically useful outputs.
2. Build knowledge fusion and summarisation pipelines to support burden classification, personalised clinical summaries, confidence scoring, and comparison with expert-generated summaries.
3. Implement explainability and safety mechanisms, including source referencing, hallucination detection, bias monitoring, data drift monitoring, red‑teaming, and audit procedures.
4. Develop patient interaction modules that adapt communication according to emotional burden, health literacy, educational background, risk‑literacy, and communication needs.
5. Explore text- and voice‑based emotional analysis to support more responsive and patient‑centred communication.
6. Develop and evaluate physician voice cloning approaches, including consent procedures, voice sample collection, TTS/voice cloning adaptation, naturalness and similarity testing, fallback voices, and patient acceptability assessment.

7. Prepare federated learning deployment across partner sites, enabling local model training and performance monitoring without centralising sensitive clinical data.
8. Implement secure API integration for downstream clinical systems, including endpoints for summaries, burden classification, confidence scores, explainability outputs, and HL7 FHIR-compatible data structures.
9. Support scientific dissemination and knowledge transfer activities, including the preparation of peer-reviewed papers, conference abstracts, presentations, lectures/classes, workshops, and training materials for clinical, technical, and academic audiences.

Employer: Champalimaud Foundation
Department: BCRP
Website: https://bcrp-cf.pt/
Number and type of fellowships or contracts to be awarded: 1 fellowship
Application start date: October 6, 2026
Application closing date: October 19, 2026
Required Education Level: Bachelor’s Degree

Minimum qualifications: Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field, such as Digital Technologies and Health or a life sciences related discipline.

Specific Requirements

Essential skills:
Minimum of 2 years of research experience in digital health and generative AI.
Training and research experience in clinical studies.
Experience with Large Language Models (LLMs), Language Models (LMs), and Vision‑Language Models (VLMs).

Experience in developing chatbot systems, conversational agents.
Experience in designing or implementing user interfaces for AI-based or data-driven applications.
Experience with clinical data processing, including medical reports, clinical documents, structured data, or free-text clinical information.
Prior experience with healthcare data environments, including EHR/EMR concepts.
Experience with programming languages, preferably Python.
Effective teamwork and interpersonal skills.
Ability to work in interdisciplinary teams involving clinical, technical, and research stakeholders.
Experience with clinical NLP, information extraction, summarisation, or named entity recognition.
Experience with prompt engineering, fine‑tuning, benchmarking, or evaluation of AI models.
Knowledge in developing dashboards and integration of AI outputs into clinical systems.

Desirable skills that will also be considered:
Experience in scientific knowledge dissemination, including papers, presentations, lectures, classes, or workshops.
Scientific CV with accepted papers or manuscripts in generative AI, in peer-reviewed international journals.

Languages ENGLISH Level Excellent

Additional Information

Full immersion into a research excellence ecosystem with highly motivated researchers, supported by state-of-the-art technology and continuous development opportunities.
Remuneration: 1600€ Euros. Potentially, this value may be increased with other funds, according to experience and performance. The fellowship will be paid monthly by bank transfer. The fellowship holder will have personal accident insurance and, if not covered by any social protection scheme, can ensure the right to social security through adherence to the voluntary social insurance scheme.
Maximum allowable duration:
The Fellowship will have the duration of 6 months, with the possibility of renewal up to a maximum of 36 months (never surpassing the termination date of the project, expected at 31/08/2030). The position is expected to start on or after 01/09/2026 , in exclusiveness regime, as regulated by Lei n.º 40/2004, de 18 de Agosto, FCT (Estatuto do Bolseiro de Investigação Científica) and FCT Research Fellowship Regulations, as well as the Fellowship Regulations of the Champalimaud Foundation.

Eligibility criteria

National, Foreign or Stateless candidate(s) who hold a Bachelor degree in Digital Technologies and Health Areas or other related scientific areas and a scientific and professional curriculum that reveals a profile appropriate to the activity to be developed. Have at least one paper published in a relevant scientific journal (such as Nature Scientific Reports) in the last year on Generative AI.
In case of Bachelor degrees awarded by foreign higher education institutions, the degree must comply with the provisions of Decree‑Law No. 341/2007, of 12th of October, and all formalities established therein must be fulfilled by the deadline for application submission.

Selection process

Candidates will be screened to determine eligibility based on minimum qualifications listed in call.
Candidates meeting minimum requirements will be scored according to the required application materials:

• Interview 10% (in case of a tie).
  If provided, and if shortlisted, candidates’ referees may be contacted and may count towards
  evaluation.

Application materials:
- CV and letter of motivation indicating 2 references (one single pdf document).
Proof of qualifications (certificates) may be required at a later date for the formalization of the contract agreement. Degrees obtained abroad may need to be formally recognized in Portugal.

Notification of results
All candidates will receive a receipt of acknowledgment within 7-10 business days. The highest scoring candidate will be notified by email or telephone. All other candidates will be notified solely by email of the final outcome of the recruitment process.
After being notified, candidates will have 10 working days to present a claim for redress by email n( [e-mail] ). If no claim is received by the Champalimaud Foundation, the Evaluation Committee´s decision will become definitive.

Additional comments

About Us
Research is at the heart of the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, a modern research and clinical facility situated on the waterfront in Lisbon, Portugal. The goal of Champalimaud Research (CR) is to perform world-leading fundamental and translational research. Current research work is focused on the fields of neuroscience, physiology and cancer. Champalimaud Research comprises a team of over 400 scientists from around the world. English is the official language of the Centre. Lisbon’s sunny Atlantic Mediterranean climate, vibrant culture and high quality of life make this a great place to live and work.

Relevant Institutional InformationIn line with our community guidelines and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion policy and Gender Equality Plan, no candidate may be privileged, favored, prejudiced or deprived of any right or excluded from any duty on the basis of age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, disability, chronic illness, language, nationality, territory of origin, family status (marital, pregnancy and maternity, having or not having dependents), socioeconomic situation, education, religion, political or ideological beliefs, trade union membership, or on any other grounds which are irrelevant to decision‑making.
Legal Notices
The present call has the sole purpose of filling the indicated research position. This call may be canceled at any time on or before the jury’s evaluation of all eligible candidates and the recruitment process shall be concluded on the day of the full execution of the contract between the Champalimaud Foundation and the selected candidate.