Job Description

The Future Talent Program features internships that last up to 12 weeks and will include one or more projects. These opportunities in our Research and Development Division can provide you with great development and a chance to see if we are the right company for your long-term goals.

Nonclinical drug safety (NDS) helps advance high-quality drug candidates into development by defining the non–clinical safety and selectivity of lead compounds. NDS employees evaluate the preclinical toxicity of drug development candidates, provide mechanistic understanding of drug-induced toxicity, and assess implications for human safety. 

Our Computational Toxicology group integrates toxicological expertise, data science, and AI/ML, including emerging Large Language Model (LLM) applications, to improve the safety assessment of drug candidates, accelerate decision-making, and reduce reliance on animal testing. We have multiple openings for highly motivated summer interns to join our AI/ML Computational Toxicology team. The successful candidate will work on innovative projects applying machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and LLMs to multimodal toxicology datasets, spanning genomics, metabolomics, chemistry and structured in vivo and in vitro data as well as unstructured biomedical literature.

What you will do:

• Build and evaluate predictive models for toxicity risk and mechanistic hypotheses generation using multimodal pharmaceutical data

• Develop NLP/LLM pipelines (prompting, fine-tuning, RAG) to mine unstructured reports and literature

• Prepare dashboards (e.g., Streamlit) and present results to scientists and leadership

Education:

• Pursuing BS/MS/PhD in Computational Science, Data Science, Bioinformatics, Computational Biology/Chemistry, Computational Linguistics, or related field.

Required Experience and Skills:

• Proficient in Python; solid with statistics/ML and data wrangling (pandas/SQL)

• Hands-on with scikit-learn and at least one deep learning framework (PyTorch or TensorFlow)

• Comfortable with Git/GitHub and reproducible workflows

• Experience with NLP and LLM tools (e.g., Hugging Face, spaCy, NLTK) and techniques such as prompt design, fine-tuning, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)

• Must be available for a period of 10-12 weeks, beginning June 2027

Please note that this position may be closed before the posted end date or may remain open longer, at the discretion of the company.

Salary range:
The salary range for this role is $39,108 through $111,111.

FTP2027

RL2027

Required Skills:

Preferred Skills:

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As an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer, we provide equal opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, age, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.  As a federal contractor, we comply with all affirmative action requirements for protected veterans and individuals with disabilities.  For more information about personal rights under the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment laws, visit:

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We are proud to be a company that embraces the value of bringing together, talented, and committed people with diverse experiences, perspectives, skills and backgrounds. The fastest way to breakthrough innovation is when people with diverse ideas, broad experiences, backgrounds, and skills come together in an inclusive environment. We encourage our colleagues to respectfully challenge one another’s thinking and approach problems collectively.

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San Francisco Residents Only: We will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment in compliance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance

Los Angeles Residents Only: We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance

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Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA, also known as Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC, Rahway, NJ, USA, does not accept unsolicited assistance from search firms for employment opportunities. All CVs / resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at our company without a valid written search agreement in place for this position will be deemed the sole property of our company.  No fee will be paid in the event a candidate is hired by our company as a result of an agency referral where no pre-existing agreement is in place. Where agency agreements are in place, introductions are position specific. Please, no phone calls or emails. 

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