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Reza Abbasi-Asl - Professor, Neuroscience
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours Location: Off Campus
Deep neural networks achieve state-of-the-art performance in many tasks such as computer vision and natural language processing. Interpreting deep networks is essential for applying them to scientific applications such as healthcare. Two prominent approaches to interpret neural networks are saliency methods and network compression. However, both methods...
Digital Humanities and Data Science Biological & Health SciencesReza Abbasi-Asl - Professor, Neuroscience
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours Location: Off Campus
Characterizing the the neural function in the brain and its relationship with connectivity is an eminent question of visual sensory processing. With the recent increase in the amount of the data collected from brain, tools based on machine learning principles play an essential role in understanding the brain function. The...
Digital Humanities and Data Science Biological & Health SciencesReza Abbasi-Asl - Professor, Neuroscience
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours Location: Off Campus
Computational tools based on machine learning principles have shown promising results in analyzing medical images. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are one of the most successful tools in this domain. While most of the algorithms based on CNNs are supervised and with the increasing amount of un-labeled datasets, it...
Digital Humanities and Data Science Biological & Health SciencesReza Abbasi-Asl - Professor, Neuroscience
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours Location: Off Campus
There is an immense amount of unstructured and uncollated data in neuroscience and bioinformatics that could be used to guide knowledge discovery. Large language models (LLMs) have shown potential in extracting and analyzing unstructured natural language corpora and are promising for semi-automated processing of text into scientific knowledge such...
Digital Humanities and Data Science Biological & Health SciencesDavid Ackerly - Professor, Integrative Biology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: On Campus
Climate change poses special challenges to plant taxa that depend on isolated habitat patches like montane meadows. Opportunities to move and/or adapt may be limited. Evolutionary adaptation requires heritable variation in adaptive traits, which is often low for isolated populations. Non-evolutionary adaptation via phenotypic plasticity depends on individuals...
Biological & Health SciencesDavid Ackerly - Professor, Integrative Biology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: On Campus
Habitat restoration will only provide long-term benefits if restored vegetation is resilient to climate change. Sourcing plant material from distant climate zones may achieve climate resilience but carries other risks. Restorationists need a framework for sourcing climate-resilient plant material locally. Our research addresses this problem for Lemmon’s willow...
Biological & Health SciencesDavid Ackerly - Professor, Integrative Biology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: On Campus
The Levant is an understudied biodiversity hotspot that harbors one of the world’s richest extratropical floras. This project aims to improve our understanding of the distribution of vascular plant diversity of Western Lebanon and Syria through an evolutionary lens. We will sequence DNA from each genus native to the Levant...
Biological & Health SciencesRodrigo Almeida - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: On Campus
Grapevine leaf roll disease and red blotch disease are two economically important grape pathogens in California. The diseases are currently not curable, so mitigation efforts including roguing (removing infected plants) are used to reduce disease spread. Roguing requires correctly identifying infected plants, which can be difficult to do visually due...
Biological & Health SciencesRodrigo Almeida - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: On Campus
Xylella fastidiosa is a xylem-limited bacterium associated with several important diseases in a wide range of plants. In California, the bacterium causes Pierce's Disease (PD) of grapevine, which has economic and management implications for the state's wine industry. The range of PD in California is limited by cold winter...
Biological & Health SciencesChristopher Ames - Professor, Neurological Surgery
Status: Check back for status Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: On Campus
At UCSF Spine Center, we have a number of studies related to patient outcomes after surgery. We have studies on frailty, pain and pain medication, personality changes from surgery, surgical complications, analysis of patient-reported outcomes with natural language processing, the effectiveness of a pre-habilitation program, and the effectiveness...
Biological & Health SciencesColette (Coco) Auerswald - Professor, Public Health
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: On Campus
Youth and Allies Against Homelessness (YAAH) is a research team based in i4Y (Innovations for Youth), a Berkeley School of Public Health research center. YAAH is made up of youth community members with lived experience of homelessness, undergraduate and graduate students who have experienced homelessness and/or who have demonstrated...
Social Sciences Biological & Health SciencesBarbara Baker - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: Off Campus
In eukaryotes, small RNAs (20–30 nt) derived from double stranded RNA precursors direct proteins to regulate chromatin function, transcription, RNA stability, and translation through sequence-targeted mechanisms termed RNA silencing. Two main categories of plant small RNAs, microRNAs (miRNAs) and short interfering RNAs (siRNAs), guide cleavage of mRNA and...
Biological & Health SciencesBrian A. Barsky - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: On Campus
This project is investigating algorithmic vision correction for the user of a display based on his or her spectacles prescription in simple cases or based on measurements of the optical aberrations of his or her vision in more complex cases. Our approach is to compute an altered display that when...
Engineering, Design & Technologies Biological & Health SciencesBrian A. Barsky - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: On Campus
This project is concerned with assistive technology that enables users with fine motor control difficulties to navigate, select, point, and click without physically manipulating a mouse. The idea is to use a camera to capture the user’s hand movements. There are many individuals who do not have the ability to...
Engineering, Design & Technologies Biological & Health SciencesJeff Belkora - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: Off Campus
STUDENT TESTIMONIALS “This apprenticeship has been the highlight of my time at Berkeley. It has given me a chance to help patients in difficult medical situations, and as a pre-health undergraduate, this is important to me.” “It is a great opportunity to get clinical experience and work with like...
Biological & Health Sciences Social Sciences Engineering, Design & Technologies Education, Cognition & PsychologyStefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: On Campus
Rapid Reviews\Infectious Diseases (RR\ID) [rrid.mitpress.mit.edu], is an initiative of the MIT Press and the University of California, Berkeley. It is an open access, rapid-review overlay journal for the accelerated curation and peer review of COVID-19 and emerging infections disease-related research. RR\ID takes a transdisciplinary...
Biological & Health Sciences Digital Humanities and Data ScienceStefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: Off Campus
Rapid Reviews\Infectious Diseases (RR\ID) [rrid.mitpress.mit.edu], is an initiative of the MIT Press and the University of California, Berkeley. It is an open access, rapid-review overlay journal for the accelerated curation and peer review of COVID-19 and emerging infections disease-related research. RR\ID takes a transdisciplinary...
Biological & Health Sciences Digital Humanities and Data ScienceStefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
Psychiatric disorders including PTSD; and alcohol use disorder and other addictions are responsible for a large portion of both the global burden and US burden of disease. Current therapies help a significant portion of people suffering from these disorders. Nevertheless, many patients do not respond adequately or cannot tolerate the...
Biological & Health Sciences Digital Humanities and Data ScienceStefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: Off Campus
The last few decades have seen growing acknowledgement and emphasis on the need to bridge gaps between research and practice. Implementation Science (IS) is the scientific study of methods to promote the systematic uptake of research findings and other evidence-based practices into routine practice. An evolving and interdisciplinary field...
Biological & Health Sciences Digital Humanities and Data ScienceDavid Bilder - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: On Campus
Malignant tumors are distinct from benign growths in their ability to hijack and disrupt various processes in the body. Some common examples that most people are familiar with are tumor invasion of adjacent tissues, recruitment vasculature to accelerate growth, and dissemination of metastasizing cells. However, a less well-appreciated fact...
Biological & Health SciencesBenjamin Blackman - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: On Campus
In order to test the function of specific genes or the impact of genetic variants on phenotype, genetic manipulation is required. The aim of the project is to assist with development and implementation of methods for genetic transformation of sunflower and monkeyflower, the two main study systems in the lab...
Biological & Health SciencesBenjamin Blackman - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: On Campus
A major focus of our lab is identifying how genetic and phenotypic variation that has evolved among plant populations adapts plants to their local climates and habitats. Understanding how these adaptations to climate variation across space have evolved will help us understand mechanisms by which plants can evolve to cope...
Biological & Health SciencesBenjamin Blackman - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: On Campus
Flowering and reproduction are highly regulated processes in composite plants like sunflower which produce disks that are clusters of many individual flowers. Environmental cues like light and temperature interact with the circadian clock regulate what time of the season buds first start to develop, and the same integration of internal...
Biological & Health SciencesBenjamin Blackman - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: On Campus
During floral development, patterns of pigment are painted on to the petals of many plants, and these pigments often serve to attract and direct bee pollinators toward pollen and nectar rewards. We have found several natural variants affecting the nectar guide pigmentation patterns of the common monkeyflower in both the...
Biological & Health SciencesRauri Bowie - Professor, Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: On Campus
We are working on a project to study the adaptation and evolutionary history of hummingbirds and sunbirds. Hummingbirds and sunbirds are two groups of birds that have independently adopted nectar as a major component of their diet and have evolved to be morphologically similar. Our project aims to explore whether...
Biological & Health SciencesRauri Bowie - Professor, Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: On Campus
My lab is involved with a large collaborative project to study disease transmission within and among species of wild birds. As part of this project, swabs of a variety of bird species are being collected to study their microbial communities (i.e. their microbiome). Lab studies suggest that microbial diversity can...
Biological & Health SciencesRauri Bowie - Professor, Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: On Campus
Students can assist with several ongoing research projects that investigate geographic variation and species limits in birds and integrate these data with quantification of prevalence of disease vectors such as bird malaria and trypanosome infections...
Biological & Health SciencesRauri Bowie - Professor, Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: On Campus
Nest structures are widespread across animals including insects, fish, amphibians, and most conspicuously, birds. Despite their ubiquity, nests remain one of the most understudied components of avian life history. Some of the most remarkable examples of elaborate nest design are within the passerine weaverbirds (family Ploceidae). Weaverbirds are an Old...
Biological & Health SciencesSteven Brenner - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours Location: On Campus
RNA-seq has been widely used in biological and medical research because of its capability to quantify transcriptome changes. Researchers usually use their impressions and experience to choose whether to analyze transcriptome changes in gene expression or alternative splicing levels. A more systematic way to determine whether to focus on...
Biological & Health Sciences Engineering, Design & TechnologiesSteven Brenner - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours Location: On Campus
Genome sequencing identifies a vast number of genetic variants. Predicting these variants’ molecular and clinical effects is one of the preeminent challenges in genetics. Accurate prediction of the impact of genetic variants improves our understanding of how genetic information yields molecular and cellular functions and is an essential step toward...
Biological & Health Sciences Engineering, Design & TechnologiesSteven Brenner - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: On Campus
Proteins often fold into compact structural units, called domains. Protein domains are basic units of protein function and evolution. Delineating domain boundaries is a prerequisite for further analyses of protein structures. However, this process is largely a manual process and the accuracy of these computer programs is still not satisfactory...
Biological & Health Sciences Engineering, Design & TechnologiesSteven Brenner - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours Location: On Campus
The field of genome interpretation is essential for our understanding of human biology and the advancement of personalized medicine. However, the rapid accumulation of genomic data far exceeds our capacity for reliable interpretation. Consequently, the majority of variation discovered by next generation sequencing technologies is of unknown significance. These variants...
Biological & Health Sciences Engineering, Design & TechnologiesCharles Briggs - Professor, Latinx Research Center
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: On Campus
That's what you call solidarity. Everybody pitching in, everybody doing their part. We each one, teach one, each one, reach one!” - Yolanda Chacon- Serna, labor organizer and health advocate “Health is politics by other means” Alondra Nelson, author of Body and Soul: The Black Panters and the Fight Against Medical...
Social Sciences Biological & Health SciencesGeorge A. Brooks - Professor, Integrative Biology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: On Campus
Projects 1 (Cell and Molecular Regulation of Metabolism) and 2 (Whole body Metabolic Regulation) are related. The student will be working on a large interdisciplinary research project investigating the effects of aging, gender and physical fitness on the control the balance of energy derived from different fuel sources within the...
Biological & Health SciencesGeorge A. Brooks - Professor, Integrative Biology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: On Campus
Projects 1 (Cell and Molecular Regulation of Metabolism) and 2 (Whole body Metabolic Regulation) are related. The student will be working on a large interdisciplinary research project investigating the effects of aging, gender and physical fitness on the control the balance of energy derived from different fuel sources within the...
Biological & Health SciencesGeorge A. Brooks - Professor, Integrative Biology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: On Campus
We are in the process of identifying the physiological signals responsible for lactate transporter expression. For this purpose when have developed a muscle cell culture system to study the influences of various putative factors in lactate transporter gene and protein expression. This project can cell culture, Western bottling (for protein...
Biological & Health SciencesGeorge A. Brooks - Professor, Integrative Biology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: On Campus
The applicant will work with GSI/GSR Austin Peck on the discovery of metabolic signaling following Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) to rats and mice. Responsibilities will run the full gambit from assisting in animal handling (including care and feeding), to data collection and analysis. Injured and uninjured control animals will...
Biological & Health SciencesTimothy Brown - Professor, Public Health
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: On Campus
This project will implement and disseminate the FUTUREPAIN validated questionnaire as a screening device to determine who will benefit from a series of online mind-body interventions (affective self-awareness, mindfulness, and neurobiological education) to treat chronic pain for five chronic pain conditions. This involves developing and testing the online...
Biological & Health SciencesTimothy Brown - Professor, Public Health
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: On Campus
Large racial/ethnic disparities exist in medical care. Attenuation or removal of these disparities requires a rigorous understanding of the relevant underlying mechanisms. One such mechanism is high-quality physician-patient relationships. High-quality physician-patient relationships are associated with improved health outcomes and lower costs. However, such relationships appear...
Biological & Health SciencesTimothy Brown - Professor, Public Health
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: On Campus
This project will conduct the first systematic review and meta-analysis to identify the most effective and cost-effective intervention components for universal and targeted (indicated and selected) suicide prevention among college students in a global context. Special attention will be placed on disparities in suicide prevention across sociodemographic subgroups...
Biological & Health SciencesTimothy Brown - Professor, Public Health
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: On Campus
This project will use simulation methods to determine the cost-effectiveness of mind-body interventions using data from randomized controlled trials, national survey data, and other resources. The goal is to publish a peer-reviewed article to help establish the value of these interventions in healthcare. This has not been...
Biological & Health SciencesRoy Caldwell - Professor, Integrative Biology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: On Campus
Research in my laboratory is focused on stomatopod crustaceans, or mantis shrimp as they are commonly called. Stomatopods are marine predators that have evolved powerful raptorial appendages used in prey capture and processing as well as in inter- and intraspecific fighting. Current research in my laboratory is examining several aspects...
Biological & Health SciencesRoy Caldwell - Professor, Integrative Biology
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: On Campus
In my lab we also study octopus behavior. Very few octopus species have been successfully hatched and reared in the laboratory. Species with direct development might be useful for studying the early development of behavior. Since juvenile octopus must be reared individually, this is a labor intensive and time consuming...
Biological & Health SciencesAndy Chang - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours Location: Off Campus
The carotid body is a mammalian chemoreceptor that senses changes in blood oxygen to regulate breathing. However, carotid body becomes hyperactive in chronic diseases like hypertension, sleep apnea, chronic heart failure, and metabolic syndrome, and ablation of carotid body activity improves symptoms like hypertension, cardiac arrhythmia, and insulin resistance. We...
Biological & Health SciencesLu Chen - Professor, Optometry
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hrs Location: On Campus
The major goal of our research is to discover new therapeutic targets for ocular diseases, such as inflammation, transplant rejection, and glaucoma. We focus to study the mechanisms and regulation of lymphatic and blood vessel formation in physiological and pathological situations, a field of new discovery in recent years. A...
Biological & Health SciencesIrene Chen - Professor, Computational Precision Health
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours Location: On Campus
This project will investigate the presence of biases in large language models (LLMs) designed for clinical applications...
Biological & Health Sciences Digital Humanities and Data ScienceIrene Chen - Professor, Computational Precision Health
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours Location: On Campus
This project involves leveraging AI techniques to model and predict health outcomes resulting from extreme weather events due to climate change...
Biological & Health Sciences Digital Humanities and Data ScienceIrene Chen - Professor, Computational Precision Health
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours Location: On Campus
This project involves analyzing clinical data to better understand diabetes progression patterns and equity in diagnostic testing and treatment decisions...
Biological & Health Sciences Digital Humanities and Data ScienceJohn Chorba - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
PCSK9 chaperones the low-density lipoprotein receptor (LDLR) to the lysosome for degradation, thereby raising circulating LDL (i.e. “bad” cholesterol) and accelerating atherosclerosis and heart disease. Despite its validation as a drug target, PCSK9 has proven difficult to drug with small molecules, at least in part because of its single...
Biological & Health SciencesJohn Chorba - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: On Campus
The LDL receptor clears atherogenic LDL particles from the bloodstream and plays a major role in cholesterol and membrane homeostasis. Through a genome-wide CRISPR interference screen, we identified novel regulators of the LDL receptor as potential therapeutic targets for cholesterol lowering. We have shown that CSDE1 is an RNA...
Biological & Health Sciences