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MD Anderson Cancer Center · 1 day ago

Postdoctoral Fellow - Radiation Oncology - Research

Houston, TX

Full-time

Hybrid

New Grad, Entry Level

$64K/yr - $76K/yr

MD Anderson Cancer Center is a leading institution in cancer care and research, and they are seeking a Postdoctoral Fellow to support large-scale, NIH-funded translational oncology studies. The role involves designing and maintaining research-grade data infrastructure and collaborating with various professionals to enhance data systems and analytics in the field of oncology.

Health CareHealth DiagnosticsHospitalMedical

Growth Opportunities

Responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain production-quality research data pipelines supporting prospective and retrospective oncology cohorts

Implement ETL / ELT workflows to ingest, transform, validate, and harmonize structured and unstructured data from: Electronic health records (EHR), Imaging metadata and derived features, Patient-reported outcomes (ePROs), Dental and oral health assessments, Research databases and external registries

Proactively identify opportunities to improve data quality, completeness, and reproducibility across research workflows

Serve as a technical resource for data model design, schema evolution, and versioning

Support the development and maintenance of research ontologies and common data elements (CDEs) aligned with national standards (e.g., clinical, imaging, and outcomes domains)

Translate existing research data models into ontology-based representations to support analytics, interoperability, and AI workflows

Document data schemas, ontologies, transformations, and analytical assumptions to support transparency and reuse

Collaborate with investigators to refine data structures that improve extensibility, semantic clarity, and downstream analysis

Prepare structured and unstructured datasets for predictive, descriptive, and exploratory modeling, including AI/ML and statistical analyses

Support LLM-based workflows for extraction of clinical concepts from free-text (e.g., clinical notes, imaging reports, pathology reports)

Assist with feature engineering, cohort construction, and data serialization for modeling and visualization platforms

Build and manage data assets using modern analytics platforms; experience with Palantir Foundry is desired but not required

Create and maintain backing datasets, transformations, and ontology objects

Implement data validations, permissions, and pipeline monitoring

Design and deploy interactive, ontology-driven workflow-specific Workshop Apps

Apply equivalent best practices using relational databases, Python/SQL workflows, and cloud or on-prem research environments

Work closely with clinicians, research coordinators, statisticians, and informatics teams to translate scientific questions into data solutions

Produce clear technical documentation (data dictionaries, pipeline descriptions, SOPs)

Support IRB-compliant data governance, including secure handling of PHI and research data

Assist with onboarding and training of research staff in data systems and best practices

Contribute to abstracts, figures, and analytic summaries for publications and grant reporting

Qualification

Data EngineeringETL / ELT WorkflowsAI/ML ModelingOntology DevelopmentPython/SQL WorkflowsData Quality ImprovementData DocumentationResearch OperationsCollaborationTechnical Writing

Required

The appointee recently (within three years) completed their education (doctorate) or completed previous postdoctoral experience or graduate medical education

The appointment is temporary

The appointment involves substantial full-time research or scholarship

The appointment is viewed as preparatory for a full-time academic and/or research career

The appointment is not part of a clinical training program

The appointee works under the supervision of a senior scholar or a department in a university or similar research institution (e.g., national laboratory, National Institutes of Health (NIH), etc.)

The appointee has the freedom to and is expected to publish the results of his or her research or scholarship during the period of the appointment