Postdoctoral Fellow, Collaborative Systems

Base pay range

$/yr - $/yr

This Basis Postdoctoral Fellowship supports postdocs joining the Collaborative Intelligent Systems project, which aims to reason about a large class of collaborative behaviors, spanning a broad range of species and contexts. You will be mentored by Emily Mackevicius. In addition, you may select a co‑mentor external to Basis. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis until the role is filled.

PhD students interested in a 3–4 month internship prior to graduating are encouraged to apply here.

Basis is a nonprofit applied AI research organization with two mutually reinforcing goals. The first is to understand and build intelligence
, establishing the mathematical principles of reasoning, learning, decision making, understanding, and explaining, and constructing software that implements these principles. The second is to advance society’s ability to solve intractable problems
, expanding the scale, complexity, and breadth of problems we can solve today, and accelerating our future problem‑solving capability. To achieve these goals, we’re building a new technological foundation inspired by human reasoning and a new kind of collaborative organization that puts human values first.

Emily Mackevicius is a co‑founder and director of Basis Research Institute, leading the Collaborative Intelligent Systems group. She completed postdoctoral work studying memory‑expert birds in the Aronov lab and the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia, and her PhD work studied how birds learn to sing in the Fee lab  focuses on emergent intelligent behaviors, especially in distributed and recurrent systems, and combines theoretical work with experimental practice, including high‑resolution behavioral recordings of animal groups foraging in environments from NYC parks and subways to Arctic Alaska.

We study collaborative intelligent systems in the wild, focusing on how social species coordinate, communicate, and adapt in complex environments. Our work spans multiple levels of behavior, from fine‑grained group foraging and navigation decisions to city‑scale ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Using multimodal data (audio, video, environmental, and genetic), we develop probabilistic and dynamical systems models that investigate how communication and cooperation shape resilience in changing ecosystems.

The Fellow will contribute to data analysis, modeling, or field data collection for our “behavioral weather station” network monitoring social species across cities.

• Researchers holding a PhD in neuroscience, cognitive science, behavioral science, computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, or related fields.
• Experience in the following research areas is highly valued:
  • Behavioral modeling using AI / machine learning / computer vision techniques
  • Multi‑agent animal communication
  • Environmental modeling, e.g., Gaussian splat models, semantic segmentation
• Strong programming skills, including experience developing novel approaches and contributing to larger codebases.
• Demonstrated track record in scientific research, evidenced through publications, technical reports, or impactful software projects.

• Conduct independent and collaborative research focused on the Collaborative Intelligent Systems project.
• Analyze multi‑agent, multi‑species behavioral data, including fieldwork datasets collected at Basis as well as open‑source datasets and those from collaborators.
• Coordinate research with collaborators and the Basis Core Tech team.
• Disseminate research findings through open‑source code, academic publications, and/or presentations at leading conferences.
• Provide mentorship to junior team members and contribute to the scientific discourse through seminars, workshops, and collaborative projects.

• Full‑time:
  This fellowship is full‑time and has a duration of 2 years, with a possible extension.
• Location:
  
  This is an in‑person position in Cambridge, MA or New York, with a preference for Cambridge. You will be expected to travel periodically, funded by Basis, about once every six to eight weeks, for Basis‑wide in‑person events, typically in New York City.
• Salary:
  Competitive with leading postdoctoral fellowships.
• Start date:
  
  Immediate start possible.