URAP

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 (more...)

Reza 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 (more...)

Reza 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 (more...)

Reza 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 (more...)

Kathryn Abrams - Professor, Law

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project examines the mobilization of undocumented immigrants in Phoenix, beginning with resistance to SB 1070 and "enforcement by attrition" and continuing through the Trump administration. It seeks explain the emergence of a social movement of undocumented immigrants and analyze the practices through which social movement organizations support (more...)

Kathryn Abrams - Professor, Law

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project will focus on social movement activity, and analyze the legal strategies, tactical choices, and coalition building involved in rebuilding reproductive rights and attacking structural sources of reproductive inequality (including inequality on the basis of race, socioeconomic status, and immigration status) in abortion restrictive states. Currently the research is (more...)

David 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 (more...)

David 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 (more...)

David Ackerly - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Check back for status     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 (more...)

Sabrina Agarwal - Professor, Anthropology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

The deaths of Undocumented Border Crossers (UBC’s) continue to remain an area of engagement and research among bioanthropologists within the United States, specifically in the border states of Arizona, Texas, and California. Ongoing research within the Skeletal Biology lab seeks to analyze skeletal samples from the Pima County Office of (more...)

Sabrina Agarwal - Professor, Anthropology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Working with human skeletal remains from archaeological sites, bioarchaeologists can help to reconstruct health profiles of past peoples. While there is good deal of historical and archaeological research on the later Middle Ages in Europe and more specifically in Italy, bioarchaeological studies of from Medieval Italy have focused primarily on (more...)

Sabrina Agarwal - Professor, Anthropology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

An ongoing research of PI Agarwal's research and writing delves into the bioethics of bioarchaeological practice, scientific racism, and osteological conservation and collection. This project is focused on the history and ethical responsibility of scientists working with skeletal anatomical legacy collections particularly from India. India was the primary global red (more...)

Vinod Aggarwal - Professor, Political Science

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

The Berkeley Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Study Center (BASC) brings together scholars from various disciplines, institutes, and centers from Berkeley and around the world to foster collaborative research on APEC and other trade-related issues. We are looking for students interested in working on the US-China superpower competition, particularly (more...)

Vinod Aggarwal - Professor, Political Science

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

The Berkeley Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Study Center (BASC) brings together scholars from various disciplines, institutes, and centers from Berkeley and around the world to foster collaborative research on APEC and other trade-related issues. Our activities include research projects, business leadership conferences, international conferences, colloquia, policy briefings, and newsletter (more...)

Vinod Aggarwal - Professor, Political Science

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Business and Politics is an internationally ranked, peer-reviewed international political economy journal. This is a fantastic opportunity for students who desire social science writing and editing experience. This URAP also provides a unique inside look at the academic publishing process (more...)

Vinod Aggarwal - Professor, Political Science

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

While most developing countries have adopted renewable energy policies, adopters vary widely in their success to kickstart a renewable energy industry. Some have installed a lot of renewable energy like Thailand and Vietnam, while others like Indonesia struggle to sustain investment. This project leverages firm level data to understand how (more...)

Alice Agogino - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Description: Squishy robots are rapidly deployable mobile sensing robots for disaster rescue, remote monitoring and space exploration. Our emergent technologies are at the fusion of robotics, mobile sensing, machine learning, big data fusion and smart IoT (Internet of Things). Our first target market is the HazMat and CBRNE (Chemical, biological (more...)

Alice Agogino - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Squishy Robotics intends to understand and implement new smart sensors that can be added to its robots to increase the number of possible use cases, and hence sales. A variety of sensors (thermal, zoom, audio, methane) will be considered, then one or two will be selected for further development based (more...)

Alice Agogino - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Project #1. theDesignExchange.org: (1) theDesignExchange: We are in the process of designing and developing the DesignExchange, an interactive web portal for the design and design strategy community. The DesignExchange aims to meet three needs: consolidate and organize the many design and design research methods used, develop a community of practitioners (more...)

Alice Agogino - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

This research project originated from a longstanding relationship between the Pinoleville Pomo Nation from Northern California and an interdisciplinary research group from UC Berkeley. After conversations with the Tribal Council and researchers’ participation in tribal gatherings, issues around well-being, and education were identified as areas of common interest. One (more...)

Bassem Al-Sady - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Genes in our genome can be kept in active or inactive states in different cell types. Genes coding for opposing cell types are heritably kept inactive. This is possible because a gene repressive structure called heterochromatin can “grow” over regions containing these genes in some, but not other cell types (more...)

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a crucial driver of much of the recent progress in vision and language modeling. In the SSL paradigm, a model is pre-trained through a pretext task that only involves unlabeled data—the pre-trained representation is then fine-tuned on downstream tasks of interest (more...)

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

In Self-supervised learning (SSL), a model is pre-trained through a pretext task that only involves unlabeled data—the pre-trained representation is then fine-tuned on downstream tasks of interest where only a small number of labeled examples may be available. In this project, we will explore novel (more...)

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Large language models (LLMs) pre-trained on large corpora of text have demonstrated incredible capabilities across with zero- or few-shot performance in new tasks that differ from their pre-training objectives. In this projects, we will study the zero- and few-shot performance of LLMs repurposed to issue predictions (more...)

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Institutional constraints and concerns over patient privacy impedes sharing of clinical data among researchers. High-fidelity synthetic data that mimics the real data distribution without revealing real data for individual patients can help empower and democratize research applying machine learning models to clinical problems. In this project, we will use (more...)

Reza Alam - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

We are looking for motivated students who want to develop their experimental, theoretical, and computational analysis abilities. The goal of this research is to discover new theories that will be applied to ocean wave energy converter and off-shore structures. You will have the opportunity to design and conduct scientific (more...)

Reza Alam - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Ships spend $45B/year extra fuel because of encountering ocean waves en route, which translates to 1% of the world’s total Green House Gas (GHG) emission. If waves that a ship will encounter can be predicted, then through a smart routing algorithm a significant (>20%) improvement in the performance (more...)

Reza Alam - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

NASA has been tasked with the goal of going to the Moon by 2024 with the Artemis Program, using their Orion spacecraft. In the event of an unplanned egress (launch abort, contingency landing, etc.), the Orion crew would exit their vehicle and utilize their life raft in an aquatic environment (more...)

Reza Alam - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Two positions available: 1) Design and fabrication, 2) Modeling and Controller Design Field Oriented Control (FOC) is an advanced commutation and current control technique that allows Brushless DC (BLDC) motors to run more efficiently, with a higher power factor, with smoother motion (less torque ripple), and with no compromise in (more...)

Rodrigo 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 (more...)

Rodrigo Almeida - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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 (more...)

Christopher Ames - Professor, Neurological Surgery

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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 (more...)

Cameron Anderson - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Apprentices are needed to work on a project related to power and risk-taking. Students will participate in a major meta-analysis project in which the effect of power on risk-taking is tested. Students will be responsible for reviewing relevant academic papers and their findings to be included in (more...)

Cameron Anderson - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Please write Project 2: Social Psychology and Business Lab at the top of your application if you are interested in applying to our lab. We are seeking to recruit 2-3 new Research Apprentices who are interested in finding out more about social psychology and business research to join our research (more...)

Cameron Anderson - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

PLEASE SPECIFY in your application if you are interested in working on this project by mentioning the project title*** We are seeking to recruit a couple of Research Apprentices who are interested in finding out more about social psychology and business research to join our research lab. Our goal is (more...)

Cameron Anderson - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Apprentices are needed to work on projects related to perceptions of competence and social status. Students will conduct a major new lab experiment in which participants are videotaped conducting a consulting case interview. Students may be trained as interviewers, or manage lab logistics. Students will examine perceptions of competence and (more...)

Diliana Angelova - Professor, Art History

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

Conjure in your mind's eye any famous statue from Greco-Roman antiquity. Venus de Milo, the Doryphorus, the Nike of Samothrace are all now ghostly white. Not so in antiquity. Originally, all of them were covered with pigments. Reddish-rose pigments for the lips and cheeks (more...)

Diliana Angelova - Professor, Art History

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project aims at creating a born-digital catalogue of Byzantine boxes made of ivory, bone, and wood. These objects, dated between the 10th and the 12th centuries, reveal an unusual side of Byzantium. They demonstrate that the Byzantines valued merrymaking, eroticism and the cultural heritage of Greece and Rome (more...)

Diliana Angelova - Professor, Art History

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

Tasks associated with researching in the humanities (more...)

Christopher Ansell - Professor, Political Science

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Advanced German, Polish, or Hungarian language skills are needed to participate in this project.** The European continent has undergone major shifts since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Eleven countries have emerged from a totalitarian Communist system, embracing capitalism and democracy and joining the European Union. These transitions had major (more...)

Christopher Ansell - Professor, Political Science

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

The European Union is a complex international organization that influences all aspects of contemporary European politics and society. While scholars have studied how the European Union interacts with nations a great deal, it is often portrayed as having a limited capacity to enforce its rules and norms at the national (more...)

Christopher Ansell - Professor, Political Science

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Parliamentary questions are one of the key means of oversight in the European Union. This project aims to analyze the ways that this oversight process is used at the European level through large scale, quantitative text analysis, machine learning, and statistical methods as well as finalize the data structure for (more...)

Sarah Anzia - Professor, Public Policy

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

The research is focused on local politics in the United States and will support a project about the contents of local government meetings. This project explores: 1) what local governments do in the US, 2) the role of partisanship in what they do, and 3) how municipality size conditions the (more...)

Sarah Anzia - Professor, Public Policy

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project examines the role of businesses and business associations in local politics and local government in the United States. The project has two parts. One is a qualitative data collection focused on the local policy priorities and goals of chambers of commerce in cities and counties across the country (more...)

Folklore Archivist - Archivist, Folklore Program

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

Students applying would ideally already be familiar with folklore genres (e.g. by having taken Anthropology 160, The Forms of Folklore, or an equivalent course) but we are also excited to welcome new students who are interested in learning more about the field. The basic work will entail filing, cataloging and (more...)

Leonardo Arriola - Professor, Political Science

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Human rights activists play a critical role in bringing about government accountability in democratizing societies around the world. Yet, as resurgent autocratizing forces challenge democratic norms around the world, activists are increasingly confronting contentious and uncertain conditions. Over the past decade, activists have had to navigate an increasingly complex political (more...)

Colette (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 (more...)

Milton Azevedo - Professor, Spanish and Portuguese

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

The project is intended to originate an essay-length study of the situation of the Spanish language in this country, including but not limited to its use in Hispanic/Latino communities, the press, radio, and television, education, government, and other areas, as well as the influence of English on Spanish (more...)

Zehlia Babaci-Wilhite - Lecturer, UGIS

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

In this project, we will address the benefits of multilingualism engagement in schools to improve education for a more equitable world since languages are part of identities and cultures. Focusing on the leadership role in teaching and learning, a comparative study in multilingualism in the United States, South Africa and (more...)

Zehlia Babaci-Wilhite - Lecturer, UGIS

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Effective acquisition of multi-languages is mainly based on building a fortified vocabulary repertoire. Understanding and using figurative language, specifically idioms is considered a sign of students’ advanced language proficiency. However, acquiring idioms has always been a challenge for language learners. Considering the fact that NLP is rapidly flourishing in (more...)