Opportunities
Join the lab.
PULSE: Scientific Machine Learning Lab, in the Department of Scientific Computing at Florida State University, is looking for PhD students, master's and undergraduate researchers, and postdocs who want to apply machine learning to oceanography and health research.
Who we look for
We look for people from a mix of backgrounds: scientific computing, applied mathematics, computer science and machine learning, oceanography or atmospheric science, and biomedical imaging. There is no single required degree — the lab's own members hold degrees across most of these fields. What matters more is a working comfort with Python, enough mathematics to read a methods paper without translation, and a willingness to work with real, messy scientific data rather than a curated benchmark.
PhD students
PhD students in the lab are admitted through the Department of Scientific Computing's Ph.D. in Computational Science, which allows a specialization in areas including atmospheric science and computational mathematics or computer science — the tracks most of our projects fall under. Admission is departmental rather than lab-specific: applicants apply to the PhD program directly and can name a faculty interest, including Olmo Zavala-Romero, in their application. See the Department of Scientific Computing and its graduate application page for degree requirements, deadlines, and how to apply.
Master's and undergraduate researchers
Master's and undergraduate students can join the lab without a formal PhD commitment, most often through a directed individual study — research credit taken alongside coursework. That route lets a student work on a real project, writing code, running models, or processing data, for course credit rather than as a volunteer position. Interested students should reach out before the semester in which they want to start, since credit arrangements are set up through the department ahead of enrollment.
Postdocs and visiting researchers
The lab also hosts postdoctoral researchers and visiting scientists, typically tied to a specific funded project in ocean forecasting, medical imaging, or air-quality modeling. Postdoc positions are posted when funding is confirmed rather than kept open on a rolling basis, so the best first step is to email the lab with a CV and a note on which current project is the closest fit. Visiting researchers — faculty, graduate students from other institutions, or short-term collaborators — are welcome by arrangement, and should get in touch ahead of any planned visit to coordinate timing and access.
What working in the lab looks like
Lab members meet regularly to share progress, get feedback on results, and coordinate across projects. Code is developed openly wherever possible and published under the lab's GitHub organization, FSU-PULSE, so incoming students inherit working pipelines instead of starting from nothing. Model training and large-scale data processing run on Florida State's research computing cluster. Day-to-day work mixes independent coding time with pair debugging and paper reading, and most projects involve at least one domain-science collaborator outside the lab.
Funding
Funding status: to be confirmed — please ask.
How to get in touch
Email the lab at pulse-lab@sc.fsu.edu — the same address listed on the contact page — with your CV, an unofficial transcript, and a short paragraph on which project on the projects page interests you and why. If you have written code before, for coursework, personal projects, or research, include links to a GitHub profile or repository rather than attaching files. Applications that do not name a specific project or research interest are harder to route and take longer to get a reply.