Research Associate / Doctoral Candidate – AI-based Surgical Understanding (m/f/d)

In this role you will contribute to building a highly digitized operating room environment and develop AI-based methods for real-time understanding of surgical procedures. You will work at the intersection of medicine, computer science, and AI, collaborating with clinicians and engineers to advance multimodal representations and intelligent surgical assistance. This is a hands-on research position with opportunities to publish and pursue a PhD at TUM. You will help shape the data infrastructure and algorithms that support surgeons in daily practice.

• Remuneration according to TV-L
• Opportunity to pursue doctoral degree at TUM
• Interdisciplinary research environment
• Collaboration with clinicians and international partners

• Participate in innovative research projects at the intersection of medicine, computer science, and AI, collaborating with clinicians, engineers, and scientists
• Design and implement novel approaches for operating room and surgical procedure understanding, including scene graphs and graph-based models
• Develop machine learning prototypes that integrate multiple data modalities (2D/3D vision, language, audio, sensors)
• Contribute to the development and expansion of the multimodal operating room infrastructure to support surgical AI applications
• Publish research in collaboration with colleagues and international partners
• Pursue a doctoral degree at TUM as part of research activities

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or related field
• Strong background in computer vision, machine learning, and deep learning
• Experience with geometric deep learning or graph neural networks (desirable)
• Strong programming skills in Python; experience with PyTorch, PyTorch Geometric, OpenCV
• Hands-on experience with time-series, unstructured, graph-structured, 2D/3D data projects
• Ability to work in interdisciplinary clinical research environment, including operating room exposure
• Fluent written and spoken English; good German for clinical work

• Interdisciplinary collaboration
• Communication and teamwork
• Adaptability in a clinical research setting
• Python programming
• PyTorch
• PyTorch Geometric