Post-Doctoral Research Visit F/M From the ocean to the stars: SciML to accelerate scientific research

The Inria Saclay-Île-de-France Research Centre was established in 2008. It has developed as part of the Saclay site in partnership with Paris-Saclay University and with the Institut Polytechnique de Paris .

The centre has 41 project teams , 27 of which operate jointly with Paris-Saclay University and the Institut Polytechnique de Paris; Its activities occupy over 600 people, scientists and research and innovation support staff, including 44 different nationalities.

Inria Saclay is one of the eight research centres of Inria, France's national institute for research in digital science and technology, located on the Plateau de Saclay south of Paris and embedded in the Université Paris-Saclay ecosystem — one of Europe's largest concentrations of computer science, mathematics and AI research — where it hosts more than thirty project-teams jointly affiliated with CNRS and major French universities and engineering schools.

The TAU project-team (TAckling the Underspecified) is a joint Inria–CNRS–Université Paris-Saclay research group based at Inria Saclay and hosted within the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Sciences du Numérique (LISN). TAU starts from the premise that contemporary machine learning pipelines are systematically under-specified: observed data leave implicit the common-sense knowledge needed to interpret them, the labels needed to supervise them, and the causal structure needed to act on them. The team's research agenda is articulated around four tightly connected pillars — frugal learning (small-data regimes and energy-efficient deep architectures), causal learning (as a principled route to trustworthy and explainable AI), bidirectional links with statistical physics, and hybridisation of machine learning with numerical simulations (surrogate models, neural solvers and physics-informed architectures for systems governed by partial differential equations). TAU is internationally recognised for its tradition of organising competitive international challenges and benchmarks, and is a partner in flagship initiatives directly relevant to this proposal, including the Inria Challenge OcéanIA, the European TAILOR network on trustworthy AI, and the Coalition for Sustainable AI.

This project will be carried out in collaboration with the Inria Chile Research Center and the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (UTFSM) with whom TAU already has longstanding and strong collaboration partnerships.

Inria Chile was established in Santiago in 2012. The recently launched Franco-Chilean Binational Center on Artificial Intelligence, a joint initiative of the French and Chilean governments that consolidates the centre's role as the institutional anchor for sustained scientific collaboration between Inria project-teams in France and the Chilean academic ecosystem. Inria Chile has been active

Prof. Raquel Pezoa is a faculty member of the Departamento de Informática at UTFSM in Valparaíso, Chile — one of the country's leading engineering and science universities. Her research agenda sits at the intersection of deep learning and the natural sciences, with a focus on explainable AI, deep architectures for complex physical systems, and uncertainty quantification with applications in particle physics, astrophysics and medicine.

Every year Inria International Relations Department has a few postdoctoral positions in order to support Inria international collaborations.

The postdoctoral contract will have a duration of 12 to 24 months. The default start date is November 1st, 2026 and not later than January, 1st 2027. The postdoctoral fellow will be recruited by one of the Inria Centres in France but it is recommended that the time is shared between France and the partner’s country (please note that the postdoctoral fellow has to start his/her contract being in France and that the visits have to respect Inria rules for missions)

Candidates for postdoctoral positions are recruited after the completion of their Ph.D. or a first postdoctoral period. To be eligible, candidates must have defended their Ph.D. no more than 3 years before the start date of the contract. As the start date will be between November 1, 2026 and January 1, 2027, the latest eligible Ph.D. defense date will vary accordingly (approximately between November 1, 2023 and January 1, 2024).

In order to encourage mobility, the postdoctoral position must take place in a scientific environment that is truly different from the one of the Ph.D. (and, if applicable, from the position held since the Ph.D.); particular attention is thus paid to French or international candidates who obtained their doctorate abroad.

The deadline for applying to this job is before June 7, 2026.

We, a group of researchers from Inria Saclay, Inria Chile and Univ. Técnica Federico Santa María, are looking for a postdoctoral researcher to work on the use of AI to accelerate scientific research. Topics of interest, involve (but are not limited to):

• Causal structure learning and counterfactual explanation on top of the learned representations.

• Conformal prediction in scientifically realistic regimes framed in a frugal learning setting.

• Multimodal foundation models for specific scientific domains.

• Physics-informed, uncertainty-aware causal world models: interventions and counterfactual simulation for scientific discovery.

We seek to apply this research in our shared priority application areas, in particular, ocean ecosystems and climate change (see OcéanIA - https://oceania.inria.cl), identification of gamma and cosmic rays and CONDOR (see CONDOR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08850), among others

• A strong publication record, including publications at top conferences like ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, etc.

• PhD in computer science, or related fields (multidisciplinary candidates are welcome).

• Sbility to conduct and coordinate large-scale experiments.

• Ability to consolidate research results as papers.

• Subsidized meals
• Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
• Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.)
• Possibility of teleworking and flexible organization of working hours
• Professional equipment available (videoconferencing, loan of computer equipment, etc.)
• Social, cultural and sports events and activities
• Access to vocational training
• Social security coverage

€2,927 gross per month