Overview / CareersAI Careers in Research
The research industry spans academic institutions, corporate research and development (R&D) departments, and think tanks while impacting countless domains, including scientific, social, and technological research. Working in research means generating knowledge, discovery and innovation, and solving critical real-world problems through systematic investigation.
AI helps researchers design experiments, model complex systems, and analyze large datasets. It is also used in simulations, hypothesis generation, and even paper authorship assistance. In disciplines like bioinformatics and climate science, AI is also pivotal in helping extract meaning from complex data.
What would an AI professional contribute to research?
AI professionals develop models that aid discovery, build systems to optimize research pipelines, and ensure reproducibility through automated workflows. They might also collaborate with domain researchers to build intelligent tools and dashboards that support analysis and visualization.
What are the biggest opportunities and challenges for AI in research?
The greatest opportunities to leverage AI in research lie in drastically reducing the time-to-discovery process, enabling interdisciplinary work, and improving replicability and transparency in research. AI could revolutionize how research is conducted, from automating entire experiments to building AI collaborators that suggest hypotheses or critique findings. Analysis and summarization of research publications at scale can significantly augment the effort made by human researchers to synthesize knowledge toward new discoveries and hypothesis generation. With AI-integrated platforms, research could become more open, scalable, and faster, helping solve pressing global issues with greater agility.
The major challenges include the need to explain AI-derived results, a lack of standardized data, ethical concerns, funding constraints, and questions about the data itself.
How does MSAI prepare students to lead in the research space?
MSAI students can perform research in several ways and gain valuable research experience during their time in the program. Students can take independent studies as part of their electives and be exposed to the rigors of independent research under the mentorship of a faculty advisor. They can become a research assistant to a principal investigator on a research project. They can also gain research experience through their spring practicum projects, which often include projects from numerous labs across the Northwestern campus.
Where have MSAI students and alumni interned or worked?
- Algorithmic Research Group
- Northwestern
- Harvard Law
- Queen Mary University of London
- Washington University in St. Louis
Featured Alumni
KJ Schmidt
MSAI '20, Bioinformatics R&D manager at Nationwide Children's HospitalSchmidt currently works as part of the computational genomics group at the Institute for Genomic Medicine within Nationwide Children's Hospital. In that role, she is part of a larger R&D team made up of bioinformatics scientists who are responsible for advanced and cohort-level genomic research, machine learning applications, and complex statistical analyses.
She previously was an AI research scientist and product manager at Globus Labs at the University of Chicago. She also has a joint appointment at Argonne National Lab, the nation’s largest federally funded R&D center.
“The most exciting part about the work I do is the impact we have on science and the emphasis on creating tools that make science more open,” Schmidt said. “There's always more to learn. There's new research and new applications all the time, but there are so many questions that remain or pop up as you go.”
