About the role

As the Head of Frontier Research at Owkin, you will have the unique opportunity to develop long term research programs aiming at improving medical research using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. You will lead a team of top-notch ML scientists and collaborate with interdisciplinary teams of data scientists and biomedical specialists. You will report to the SVP Data Science and join the Data Science Leadership Team.

What you will be doing:

As the Head of Frontier Research, you will lead a team and a portfolio of innovative research projects. In particular, you will:

• Lead a team of talented ML Researchers focused on the development of advanced ML methods around topics that are relevant to Owkin’s portfolio of projects, including but not limited to Federated Learning, Active Learning, Generative AI, Optimization.
• Maintain a regular scientific watch and ensure Owkin stays at the forefront of AI innovation in Biotech.
• Conduct methodological research in key areas to unlock novel applications, including writing scientific publications and patents.
• Lead a highly visible, ambitious enterprise-level project aimed at developing AI systems capable of understanding, simulating, and enhancing the human immune system to improve detection, treatment, and prevention of immune-related diseases including cancer and immuno-inflammatory diseases.

Who we are looking for:

The successful candidate will be a recognized scientific leader with a team-first attitude, who thrives in a fast-paced and highly dynamic environment; and be fun to work with.

And

• Demonstrated experience in leading a high-impact research team.
• Demonstrated expertise in representation learning/large language models/generative AI, including scientific publications at top ML conferences (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, …)
• Strong analytical skills;
• Good command of coding in python, or another scientific language, and strong grasp of programming best practices
• Passionate about the intersections of healthcare and AI
• Knowledge and experience with data science tools: you have already achieved projects with real-world data and are familiar with scikit learn, xgboost, convolutional neural networks, cross validation and statistical tests
• Experience with deep learning frameworks (Tensorflow, PyTorch, Jax, etc.) : you have already worked with one of these frameworks for one of your projects
• Excellent written and oral communication skills
• Highly organized and meticulous about details; capable of tackling complex problems logically and effectively; fun to work with; honest; excited to work hard in a dynamic, fast-paced environment;

Ways to Stand Out

The following are not necessarily required, but would be a plus:

• Industry experience is a plus

• Expertise in one of the following subjects, or related ones: federated learning, active learning, bayesian optimization, optimal experimental design;

• Experience in target discovery, drug discovery or related activities, with demonstrated impact (high profile publication or industrial application);

• Expertise in one of the following subjects, or related ones: generative AI models in biology, large language models, representation learning

• Experience in biological data analysis: proteins, bulk or single-cell omics, images etc.. (high profile publication or industrial application)

• Experience managing multi-stakeholder research projects;

• Experience training large deep learning models;

• Publications in high-impact journals and conferences;

For Internal Use: #LI-CJI