Postdoctoral Fellow - TMI, Agentic AI, Texas Materials Institute, Cockrell School of Engineering

Job Posting Title: Postdoctoral Fellow - TMI, Agentic AI, Texas Materials Institute, Cockrell School of Engineering ---- Hiring Department: Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering ---- Position Open To: All Applicants ---- Weekly Scheduled Hours: 40 ---- FLSA Status: Exempt ---- Earliest Start Date: Immediately ---- Position Duration: Expected to Continue Until Aug 31, 2027 ---- Location: UT MAIN CAMPUS ---- Job Details: General Notes As a top-10 engineering school with the No. 1 program in Texas, the  Cockrell School of Engineering  at The University of Texas at Austin has been a global leader in technology innovation and engineering education for over a century. With 11 undergraduate and 13 graduate programs, over 20 research centers and a faculty community that boasts one of the highest numbers of National Academy of Engineering members among U.S. universities, Texas Engineering has launched some of the nation’s most accomplished leaders and pioneered world-changing solutions in virtually every industry, from space exploration to energy to health care. Situated in the heart of Austin — named “America’s Coolest City” by Expedia and “The Best Place to Live in the U.S.” by U.S. News and World Report — the Cockrell School embodies the city’s innovative spirit. Major companies with Austin campuses, such as Dell, National Instruments, Apple, IBM, Samsung, Google and many others, continue to recruit Cockrell School students at a remarkable rate, launching thousands of successful careers and developing Texas Engineers into industry leaders. At UT Austin, we say “What starts here changes the world.”  As a member of the university community, you will be part of an organization that is internationally recognized for our academic programs and research. Your work will have meaning and make a difference not only in the lives of our faculty, staff, and students, but also those who are impacted by our first-class academic and research programs. UT Austin provides outstanding employee benefits and total rewards packages that include: Competitive health benefits (employee premiums covered at 100%, family premiums at 50%) Voluntary Vision, Dental, Life, and Disability insurance options Generous paid vacation, sick time, and holidays Teachers Retirement System of Texas, a defined benefit retirement plan, with 7.75% employer matching funds Additional Voluntary Retirement Programs: Tax Sheltered Annuity 403(b) and a Deferred Compensation program 457(b) Flexible spending account options for medical and childcare expenses Robust free training access through LinkedIn Learning plus professional conference opportunities Tuition assistance Expansive employee discount program including athletic tickets Free access to UT Austin's libraries and museums with staff ID card Free rides on all UT Shuttle and Austin CapMetro buses with staff ID card Purpose The Postdoctoral Fellow will lead research in agentic AI and autonomous laboratory systems as part of the advanced materials characterization and discovery initiatives within the Texas Materials Institute (TMI) at The University of Texas at Austin. This position is centered on developing AI agents and agentic orchestration frameworks capable of observing, reasoning, planning, and acting across multiple classes of scientific instruments, enabling a fully integrated closed-loop “self-driving laboratory”. The role focuses on providing the AI core and foundational intelligence that coordinates the entire experimental ecosystem. The Postdoctoral Fellow will develop agentic AI models and frameworks for intelligent experimental workflows, which couple machine learning, real-time data analysis, and tool-use APIs to automate complex decision-making across materials design, liquid-phase synthesis, and characterization platforms. Responsibilities include building agentic AI systems that can interpret multimodal data streams, interface with instrument control systems, and autonomously execute experimental tasks with minimal human intervention. The Postdoctoral Fellow will be responsible for both developing and deploying agentic AI systems in real laboratory environments, ensuring robust performance under real-world noise, uncertainty, and instrument variability. This position is embedded within TMI’s larger AI-robotic materials discovery program, which integrates liquid-phase synthesis, high-throughput sample processing, and autonomous characterization. The Postdoctoral Fellow will collaborate closely with companion researchers in synthesis and characterization and will provide the foundational AI layer that enables these autonomous workflows. The agentic AI systems developed through this position are expected to interface seamlessly with high-throughput deposition tools, robotic sample-handling infrastructure, and adaptive characterization routines. Working within this highly integrated environment, the Postdoctoral Fellow will contribute to establishing a continuous experimental–computational feedback loop, in which real-time measurements feed directly into AI reasoning layers and digital twins, and autonomous agents determine the next experiments needed for accelerated materials discovery. The emphasis of this position is the creation of system-level intelligent automation, where multiple scientific instruments are coordinated through a unified agentic AI framework. The Postdoctoral Fellow will be expected to lead and publish independent research, collaborate across disciplines of computer science, materials science, electron microscopy, chemistry, and data science, and contribute to the mentorship of graduate students and junior researchers. Additional responsibilities include developing new protocols for experimental AI agents, contributing to multi-PI proposals, and helping define the architecture for fully autonomous electron microscopy systems. This position offers a unique opportunity to be at the forefron