Skip to content
The board
Opportunity
Data

Postdoctoral Research Associate — AI-Driven Reactive Robotics for Radioisotope Production

Brookhaven National Laboratory

View original
Hours
Full time
Where
Upton, NY
Posted
Aug 17

The Isotope Research & Production (IP) program at Brookhaven National Laboratory has an opening for a postdoctoral researcher to develop an AI-driven robotic system for the chemical purification steps in radioisotope production. The scientific challenge is not “can a robot move a beaker,” which is largely solved, but the open problem underneath it: fast, reactive fine-motor manipulation of fluids, precision pipetting, and pouring that corrects in real time when liquid begins to slosh or spill; coupled to a frontier vision-language model that plans and supervises the multi-step workflow.

What you'd do

  • Design and build a dual-system robotic architecture: a frontier vision-language model for task planning, affordance reasoning, and anomaly/stop-gating, coupled to a fast learned controller for reactive fine-motor manipulation.
  • Develop the fast reactive control layer using an approach matched to your background (e.g. force-feedback MPC with a learned motion prior, latent world models, imitation/vision-language-action policies, or continuous-time neural control).
  • Build the 3D perception stack for fluid-state estimation (fill level, meniscus, vessel pose) through transparent, reflective glassware, using pretrained visual encoders.
  • Develop and validate on a cold bench (water and glassware) before any active material.
  • Publish results in peer-reviewed venues and present at conferences.
  • Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, physics, mathematics, statistics/data science, or a closely related technical field
  • Backgrounds in robotics, controls, or machine learning are especially relevant.
  • Strong programming skills in Python and hands-on experience with modern ML frameworks (e.g. PyTorch).
  • Hands-on problem-solving skills and clear, concise written and verbal communication.
  • Demonstrated record of peer-reviewed publication.

About Brookhaven National Laboratory

Brookhaven National Laboratory (www.bnl.gov) delivers discovery science and transformative technology to power and secure the nation’s future. Brookhaven Lab is a multidisciplinary laboratory with seven Nobel Prize-winning discoveries, 37 R&D 100 Awards, and more than 70 years of pioneering research. The Lab is primarily supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science. Brookhaven Science Associates (BSA) operates and manages the Laboratory for DOE.

Starts
2026-08-03