Senior Research Coordinator

• Job Type: Officer of Administration
• Bargaining Unit:
• Regular/Temporary: Regular
• End Date if Temporary:
• Hours Per Week: 35
• Standard Work Schedule:
• Building:
• Salary Range: 72,000-75,000

Position Summary

The SpeechCARE Lab, led by Maryam Zolnoori, PhD, is seeking a motivated Senior Research Coordinator to support NIH/NIA-funded projects, including a recently funded R01. The lab focuses on AI, speech processing, NLP, large language models, and early detection of cognitive impairment in real-world healthcare settings.

Research environment: Collaborative, interdisciplinary team working with clinical/EHR data, patient-clinician communication, speech and language modeling, multimodal AI, fairness analysis, qualitative research, and implementation science. The lab has received national recognition through the NIA PREPARE Challenge.
At least one year commitment is necessary for this job.

Responsibilities

•  Manage, preprocess, quality-control, extract features from, and document speech, transcript, clinical, and EHR data.

  • Assist with developing, fine-tuning, and evaluating ML, NLP, speech-processing, transformer-based, and LLM models using Python or related tools.

  • Support qualitative research, including interview guides, interviews, summaries, and thematic analysis.

  • Track project milestones, timelines, deliverables, meeting notes, and follow-up tasks across study aims.

  • Coordinate communication among investigators, research staff, students, collaborators, and external partners.

  • Assist with IRB materials, data-use documentation, reports, presentations, abstracts, manuscripts, and grant-related materials.

Minimum Qualifications

•  Master's degree or higher in data science, health informatics, computer science, biostatistics, computational linguistics, or a related field.

  • Strong programming skills in Python; experience with data cleaning, preprocessing, statistical analysis, and machine-learning workflows.

  • Experience with transformer-based models, deep learning, large language models

  • Strong organization, written/verbal communication, independent work, teamwork, attention to detail, and commitment to reproducible research practices.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with speech, audio, transcript, electronic health record, or other healthcare data.

  • Familiarity with research data management, IRB protocols, secure data environments, or NIH-funded research workflows.

  • Prior experience working in an academic research lab or coordinating a federally funded research project.

  • Interest in aging, cognitive impairment, health equity, AI in healthcare, speech processing, or real-world clinical implementation.

Other Requirements

• Submit a CV or resume, a brief cover letter describing relevant experience and research interests, two reference letters, and, if available, examples of research work.

Equal Opportunity Employer / Disability / Veteran

Columbia University is committed to the hiring of qualified local residents.