The KEV.AI Lab is looking for people who want to build, not just study, the next generation of medical AI.
Who We’re Looking For
We recruit people who have, or want to develop, some combination of:
- Clinical fluency — in surgery, acute care, GI, or another procedural/acute specialty. You understand what it actually feels like to care for patients, and you have a point of view on where AI should and shouldn’t go.
- Engineering or informatics depth — in ML, NLP, signal processing, ontology engineering, or production software. You can ship working systems, not just prototypes.
- An entrepreneurial instinct — you’ve built, sold, shipped, or founded something. Or you want to. Or you know you’re going to.
- A commitment to rigor — paper reviews, validation studies, ontology work, evaluation frameworks. The unglamorous parts of the job are what separate real work from demos.
We especially welcome clinician-scientists, clinical informatics fellows, PhD students in biomedical informatics and data science, mechanical and biomedical engineers with an interest in medical devices, and designers and product managers working in healthcare.
Current Opportunities
Clinical Informatics & Biomedical Informatics Fellowships
Vanderbilt’s Clinical Informatics Fellowship and Biomedical Informatics PhD program are outstanding training pathways, and the lab takes fellows and graduate students working at the intersection of surgical informatics and AI.
Medical Students & Residents
Kev Sexton directs the Multidisciplinary Research Team in the Division of Surgical Research, which for years has produced 100+ student/resident manuscripts annually. The lab continues this mentorship model at Vanderbilt — reach out if you are a medical student or resident interested in AI in surgery, surgical education, or clinical informatics research.
Postdoctoral Fellows
We host postdoctoral scholars on a project basis — typically in ontology engineering, AI evaluation, or surgical informatics. Funding is available through lab grants and T32 training slots where eligible.
Industry Partners & Collaborators
See the Partners page. If you represent a medical society, health system, or healthcare technology company interested in collaborating on AI-in-education or AI-for-registries work, please reach out.
How to Apply or Reach Out
Send a message to kevin.sexton@vumc.org with:
- A short paragraph on what you’d want to work on in the lab and why.
- A CV, GitHub link, portfolio, or equivalent showing what you’ve built.
- Your timeline.
We read everything. We respond to what’s specific.
A Note on Fit
This lab is a good fit for people who:
- Want to build AI systems that deploy into real clinical environments, not just benchmarks.
- Care about the translation layer — ontologies, validation, governance, implementation — as much as they care about models.
- Are comfortable working at the seam of academia, industry, and medical societies.
- Believe medical AI should be trustworthy by design, not trustworthy as an afterthought.
This lab is probably not the right fit for people who:
- Want to work exclusively on fundamental ML research without connection to clinical use.
- Prefer single-institution academic work without industry or entrepreneurial collaboration.
- Are looking for pure bench science without an implementation or deployment component.
If either column describes you accurately, we’ll both do better work by being honest about it up front.