Postdoc Position in Explainable Foundation Models for Medical AI

1 - Working at the VUB

For more than 50 years, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel has stood for freedom, equality and solidarity, and this is very much alive on our campuses among students and staff alike. 

 

At the VUB, you will find a diverse collection of personalities: innovators pur sang, but above all people who are 100% their authentic selves. With some 4,000 employees, we are the largest Dutch-speaking employer, in the private sector, in Brussels; an international city with which we are only too happy to connect and where (around) our 4 campuses are located. 

 

Add to this our principle of free research - in which self-reflection, a critical attitude and an open, creative mind around scientific and social issues are central - and you have a university that is fundamentally groundbreaking and pioneering in education and research. In short: the VUB all over again. 

 

Moreover, the VUB is a member of EUTOPIA, an alliance of like-minded European universities, all ready to reinvent themselves.

2 - Position description

The Faculty of Engineering, Department Elektronica en informatica, research group Electronics and Informatics: Research – Development - Innovation, is looking for a postdoctoral researcher. 

 

More concretely your work package contains: 

We invite applications for a fully-funded postdoctoral researcher within the newly-awarded imec.icon project “Learning by Explaining Multimodal Medical AI (LEMMA)”.

 

Why trustworthy medical AI?

Deep models already outperform humans on many benchmarks, yet in the clinic they remain black boxes: radiologists cannot see why an algorithm flags a lesion, and AI engineers cannot tell when a model drifts out of distribution. LEMMA tackles these bottlenecks head-on. By fusing vision-language foundation models, visual & natural-language explanations, and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, we will make AI for medical imaging transparent, robust and data-efficient.

 

Position Overview

As a postdoctoral researcher, you will forge next-generation explainable medical foundation models. You will disrupt today’s most vibrant research frontiers:

• Embed model-based AI into self-supervised pre-training pipelines
• Finetune multimodal deep learning models that answer diagnostic questions about X-ray & CT
• Extend saliency, CAM and LLM-generated natural-language explanations to multi-image, multi-modal inputs
• Validate on real-world datasets from consortium partners in neuro-MR, digital pathology, dental X-ray, and PET/CT

 

You will:

• Publish in MICCAI, CVPR/ECCV, NeurIPS/ICLR and leading journals (T-MI, MedIA, T-PAMI).
• Work together with top international companies and top EU labs.
• Mentor PhD/MSc students and help steer project deliverables.
• Deploy demonstrators on clinical workstations.

 

For this function, our Brussels Humanities, Sciences & Engineering Campus (Elsene) will serve as your home base. 

3 - Profile

What do we expect from you?

 

• PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, or related field.

 

• Solid grounding in deep learning and computer vision.
• First-author publications in venues such as CVPR, NeurIPS or leading journals.
• Proficiency with PyTorch / TensorFlow; strong coding & analytical skills.
• Genuine interest in foundation models, explainable AI, OOD detection.
• Excellent written and spoken English. 

 

• Nice-to-Haves
• Prior work on explainable AI, vision-language models, or medical imaging.
• Experience with clinical datasets.

 

The VUB wants to be a reflection of the society where everyone's talent is valued, regardless of gender, age, religion, skin color, migration background, disability and neurodiversity.

4 - Offer

Are you going to be our new colleague?

 

You’ll be offered a contract, for an assignment of 1 FTE, for 12 months (extendable, on condition of the positive evaluation of the research activities), with planned starting date 01/09/2025. 

 

You’ll receive a salary linked to one of the scales set by the government.

 

At the VUB, you’re guaranteed an open, involved and diverse workplace where you are offered opportunities to (further) build on your career.

 

As well as this, you will also enjoy various other benefits:

• Extensive homeworking options, a telework allowance of 50 euros per month OR an internet fee of 20 euros per month;
• An open and informal working environment where attention is paid to work-life balance, and exceptional holiday arrangements with 35 days of leave (based on a fulltime contract), closure between Christmas and New Year and 3 extra leave days;
• Cost-free hospitalisation insurance;
• Full reimbursement of your home-to-work commute with public transport according to VUB-policy, and/or compensation if you come by bike; 
• A wide selection of meals in our campus restaurants at attractive prices;
• Excellent and affordable facilities for sport and exercise, a range of discounts via Benefits@Work (in  all kinds of shops, on flights, in petrol stations, amusement parks...) and Ecocheques; 
• Nursery near campus, discount on holiday camps; 
• The space to form your job content and to continuously learn through our VUB learning platforms and training courses;
• And finally: great colleagues with a healthy drive.

5 - Interested?

Is this the job you’ve been dreaming of?

 

Then apply, at the latest on 01/08/2025, via jobs.vub.be, and upload the following documents:

• your CV (education, publications, skills, GitHub / software portfolio link);
• your motivation letter (1-2 pages);
• your diploma (not applicable for VUB alumni).
• Contact details of 2–3 referees.

 

Do you have questions about the job content? Contact Prof. N. Deligiannis at nikos.deligiannis@vub.be or on +32 (0)2 629 1683.

 

Would you like to know what it’s like to work at the VUB? Go to jobs.vub.be, and find all there is to know about our campuses, benefits, strategic goals and your future colleagues.

 

Would you like more information about EUTOPIA? Go to eutopia-university.eu, and read more about the role of the VUB in the development of the EUTOPIA alliance.