Openings Available at NingLab, OSU
The NingLab (http://go.osu.edu/ninglab) at The Ohio State University offers exciting opportunities to join a highly visible, well-funded, and collaborative research program at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Research Areas
- Drug discovery: generative AI for molecule design, foundation models for various tasks in preclinical drug discovery (e.g., lead optimization), agents for drug discovery
- Healthcare & biomedicine: clinical decision support tools using electronic health records (EHRs), multimodal foundation models for biomedicine, with focused diseases including Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular diseases, and cancers.
- Recommender systems: conversation planning, multimodality recommendation, foundation models
- LLMs: reasoning, in-context learning, agents, foundation models, multimodal foundation models, benchmarking, applications in science
Recent representative publications and news reports from NingLab:
- How Ohio State students are learning to use AI to speed up making medications, WBNS 10TV
- Revolutionizing drugs with AI, OSU Innovation Showcase spotlight
- Hanwen Du, Bo Peng, and Xia Ning. Planning with diffusion models for target-oriented dialogue system. In The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) main conference, May 2025. https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.993.pdf
- Reza Averly and Xia Ning. Entity decomposition with filtering: A zero-shot clinical named entity recognition framework. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL) main conference, pages 2935–2951, April 2025. https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.150.pdf
- Ziqi Chen, Bo Peng, Tianhua Zhai, Daniel Adu-Ampratwum, and Xia Ning. Generating 3D small binding molecules using shape-conditioned diffusion models with guidance. Nature Machine Intelligence7, 758–770 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-025-01030-w
- Vishal Dey, Xiao Hu, and Xia Ning. GeLLM3O: Generalizing large language models for multi-property molecule optimization. In The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) main conference, May 2025. https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.1225.pdf
- Reza Averly, Frazier N. Baker, and Xia Ning. Liddia: Language-based intelligent drug discovery agent. The 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) main conference, Aug. 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13959
- Ziqi Chen, Oluwatosin R. Ayinde, James R. Fuchs, Huan Sun, and Xia Ning. G2Retro: Two-step graph generative models for retrosynthesis prediction. Communications Chemistry (Nature Portfolio), 6(1):102, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42004-023-00897-3 (figured in Nature’s special collection for Nobel Prize in Physics 2024).
- Bo Peng, Xinyi Ling, Ziru Chen, Huan Sun, and Xia Ning. eCeLLM: generalizing large language models for e-commerce from large-scale, high-quality instruction data. In Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), pages 40215 – 40257. JMLR.org, Jun. 2024. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3692070.3693702
- Ziqi Chen, Martin Renqiang Min, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, and Xia Ning. A deep generative model for molecule optimization via one fragment modification. Nature Machine Intelligence, 3:1040–1049, Dec. 2021. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-021-00410-2.
Opportunities: available immediately to all research areas, listed in order of priority
- Postdoctoral Researchers with a competitive salary and benefits, and career development opportunities
- Research Staff with full-time roles for M.S./Ph.D. holders in CSE or related fields
- PhD Students in the OSU Computer Science and Engineering Department, with committed 5-year GRA support
Why Join NingLab?
- Strong and sustained funding from federal agencies and industry
- Publications at top AI/ML and biomedical venues (e.g., Nature Machine Intelligence, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP)
- Alumni at Google DeepMind, Meta LLaMA, LinkedIn, etc.
- Interdisciplinary collaborations across OSU health and science, other prestigious research institutes, and industry
- Columbus, OH: 14th largest U.S. city with affordability & tech ecosystem
- OSU: #41 National Universities, #15 Public Schools, #35 Computer Science
About the PI
Dr. Xia Ning is a Full Professor of Biomedical Informatics (BMI), and Computer Science & Engineering at OSU. She is the Division Chief of AI in Digital Health at BMI, and Associate Director of Biomedical Informatics at OSU’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CTSI). She is a fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association, a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, and a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors. She received several prestigious awards, including a Sanofi iDEA-TECH Award, AWS Machine Learning Research Award, 10-Years-Highest-Impact-Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, and several best paper awards. Her research has been featured in Nature, local TV news, and other media outlets.
How to Apply
Email Dr. Ning (ning.104@osu.edu) with:
- Updated CV
- Three representative publications
- Three reference letters or names of three references
- D. applicants: also include undergraduate transcripts.
If you have any questions, please feel free to email ning.104@osu.edu as well.