Postdoctoral Fellow, Marine Science: AI Imaging of Plankton and Larvae

The Department of Marine Science and Marine Science Institute at The University of Texas at Austin, with the Department of Computer Science's computer vision group, are hiring a postdoctoral fellow at the intersection of marine ecology, ocean technology, machine learning and high-throughput biological imaging. The fellow will help pioneer advanced shadowgraph imaging for studying the transport and behaviour of plankton and larval organisms in dynamic estuarine environments, developing and validating AI pipelines for detecting, segmenting, classifying and tracking zooplankton and estuarine-dependent larvae in noisy, high-volume field imagery affected by marine snow and suspended particles.

Work includes visual validation protocols, active learning and crowdsourced annotation, behavioural tracking, unsupervised and semi-supervised discovery of biological groupings, and adaptive AI-guided imaging including reinforcement learning that optimises sampling under changing turbidity and currents. The position is based in Austin with periodic travel to the Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas to work with Dr. Sharon Herzka; salary $70,000.

PhD in computer science or electrical engineering received within the last three years; Python; modern visual recognition and image segmentation; rapid prototyping and fine-tuning of open-source computer vision models. Application: resume/CV, letter of interest and three work references.