URAP

Reza Abbasi-Asl - Professor, Neuroscience

Status: Open     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...

Reza Abbasi-Asl - Professor, Neuroscience

Status: Open     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...

Reza Abbasi-Asl - Professor, Neuroscience

Status: Open     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...

Dor Abrahamson - Professor, Education

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

What do dancing and geometrical proof have in common? Turns out that in both of these disparate practices, we imagine lines to solve the common problem of perceptually engaging the environment to perform sensorimotor tasks. In dance, these lines have been called "attentional anchors." In geometry, these lines are called...

Tess Abrahamson-Richards - Professor, Social Welfare

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: Off Campus

Our research team is conducting a scoping review of peer-reviewed and grey literature sources on Native American maternal mortality in the United States and intersections with mental health. The project will result in a scientific manuscript, a policy brief, and presentations for relevant audiences. The research is being co...

Mina Aganagic - Professor, Mathematics

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Today’s gold standard for establishing new theoretical results in mathematics is an accompanying formal computer-verification of the main theorems and their proofs (see reference below). Systems known as interactive theorem provers (ITPs), first designed to formally verify computer algorithms, have recently gained significant momentum in many mathematics communities. These...

Vinod Aggarwal - Professor, Political Science

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

The Berkeley Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Study Center (BASC) brings together scholars from Berkeley and around the world to conduct interdisciplinary research on U.S.–China strategic competition and the changing political economy of the Asia-Pacific. Our work focuses on high-tech competition—including artificial intelligence, semiconductors, quantum technologies, and...

Vinod Aggarwal - Professor, Political Science

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

This project examines how international trade and geopolitical pressures influence the development of technical standards in China. Technical standards establish requirements for product quality, safety, compatibility, testing, and production processes. Although standards are often presented as technical rules, they can also affect which firms and products are able to enter...

Vinod Aggarwal - Professor, Political Science

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

For three decades after the Cold War, the United States championed open markets. Foreign companies were welcomed to invest, build, and hire, and capital moved across borders with little political friction. That consensus has unraveled. Politicians now compete to sound tough on foreign business, Congress introduces a growing stream of...

Alice Agogino - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Status: Open     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 was the HazMat and CBRNE (Chemical, biological...

Alice Agogino - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

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). This semester we will focus on smart sensor robots for early detection...

Bassem Al-Sady - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Open     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...

Bassem Al-Sady - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

A family of small protein folds contains a binding pocket ("aromatic cage") that is conserved through eukaryotic life and recognizes chemical modifications to chromatin, the packaging material of DNA. These small folds can execute several additional functions, like nucleic acid binding, that appear critical to how epigenetic silencing is carried...

Reza Alam - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

We are seeking motivated students to contribute to the design, fabrication, and testing of wave energy converters (WECs) for autonomous sailboat drones. The goal is to develop compact, efficient systems that harvest wave energy to extend mission endurance. Students will gain hands-on experience in mechanical design, marine engineering, prototyping...

Reza Alam - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

This project develops swarm of autonomous sailboat drones powered by a hybrid renewable energy system that integrates wind propulsion, wave energy harvesting, and solar power generation. The vessels are designed for long-duration, self-sustained operation at sea, enabling continuous environmental monitoring without reliance on external charging infrastructure. The platform...

Rodrigo Almeida - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

Status: Open     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 is most known for causing Pierce's Disease (PD) of grapevine, which has significant economic implications for the wine industry. However, this pathogen has also been identified in a...

Lisa Alvarez-Cohen - Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a class of synthetic chemicals used in various industrial and consumer products, including Aqueous Film Forming Foam (AFFF), widely used since the 1960s for firefighting. Due to their persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic nature, PFAS pose significant environmental and health risks. Despite their widespread use...

Christopher Ames - Professor, Neurological Surgery

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

At the UCSF Spine Center, Dr. Christopher Ames has a number of studies examining patient outcomes after open scoliosis surgery; ranging from functional gait analyses and bioelectric assessments of fall risk to AI-powered spine surface scans and long-term tracking of frailty/activity levels/complications/pain medication usage before...

Cameron Anderson - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Open     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...

Diliana Angelova - Professor, Art History

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project aims at creating several maps needed for a publication on the the trade and cultural connections between the Roman Mediterranean and Ancient India (1ct c. BCE to 6th c. CE...

Diliana Angelova - Professor, Art History

Status: Open     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...

Diliana Angelova - Professor, Art History

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

This position entails tasks associated with researching in the humanities. It is well-suited for students who can work independently and are willing to dedicate at least of 3-5 hours of time in their week...

George Anwar - Lecturer, Mechanical Engineering

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Automate a traditional Indonesian 3D shadow stick puppet to play a traditional Gamelan (an Indonesian percussion instrument...

Sarah Anzia - Professor, Public Policy

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: Off Campus

In the wake of the events of Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, the descriptive and substantive under-representation of minorities in local governments has become an issue of pressing concern. Reformers and litigators have focused almost exclusively on the notion that minority representation is a simple matter of creating minority-majority...

Folklore Archivist - Archivist, Folklore Program

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

The Folklore Archive is seeking a detail-oriented student to help digitize archival materials. This role provides a hands-on opportunity to engage with archival processes and contribute to the preservation and dissemination of rich cultural materials from the Berkeley Folklore Archive. No prior experience in archival work or digitization...

Colette (Coco) Auerswald - Professor, Public Health

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Internship Pilot Program with Youth Experiencing Homelessness and Toolkit Development - YEDI Affiliated Project 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 people with lived experience of homelessness or who...

Doris Bachtrog - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Sex chromosomes are expected to segregate equally during meiosis, but in many species they show signs of genetic conflict. In Drosophila, certain genes are found in unusually high copy number on the X or Y chromosome, suggesting they may act as “meiotic drivers” that bias their own transmission at the...

Doris Bachtrog - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

How do new species form? One of the major challenges in evolutionary biology is identifying the genetic changes that cause populations to stop mating with one another. We study this question in Drosophila athabasca, a group of closely related fruit fly populations that are at a very early stage of...

Erica Bailey - Professor , Business, Haas School

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

The goal of this set of research projects is to understand how people experience the psychological phenomenon of authenticity. These research questions include - what personality traits are associated with seeming the most authentic? How does the use of rationales or explanations impact perceptions of authenticity? What role does self-awareness...

Barbara Baker - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 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...

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

Methods in computer vision have reached a level of maturity that we can now develop computational instruments to measure a wide range of phenomena in film -- which actors are present in a frame, the poses they have with respect to each other, the boundaries between shots -- which opens the door...

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: Off Campus

This URAP offers two related strands of research in computational literary studies, and applicants should indicate in their application which strand they are most interested in. The first strand explores the techniques that fiction uses to evoke suspense in readers, and how these techniques represent anxiety in fictional characters, in...

Patricia Baquedano-Lopez - Professor, Education

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

Background: In 2016, voters in the state of California passed Assembly Bill (AB) 2016 which now requires an ethnic studies curriculum for grades 7-12. In a state where the Latinx student population is 3,284,788 or 56.1% of all students in the state, the new ethnic studies requirement invites a deeper...

Greg Barton - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Our immune systems have evolved to balance defense against foreign pathogens with the capacity to damage normal “self” tissues. B cell and antibody function are central to this balance: in nearly all vertebrates, each among billions of B cells co-expresses 1) a highly variable B cell antigen receptor (BCR...

Annaliese Beery - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Research in our laboratory is focused on factors that influence affiliative social behavior in two species of voles. This project involves working with a graduate student training voles to press a lever to gain access to social rewards, and testing how social reward varies under different circumstances...

Annaliese Beery - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

We maintain breeding colonies of meadow voles and prairie voles for social behavior research. This project builds on basic husbandry (covered by staff) to track lineages, wean new litters and determine pup sexes to maintain the long term health and robustness of our breeding program and provide voles for research...

Jeff Belkora - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

PLEASE NOTE A PROJECT-SPECIFIC VARIANCE FROM THE GENERAL URAP STATEMENT OF INTEREST INSTRUCTIONS IN THE DESCRIPTION BELOW. *** This project is a semester-long pre-requisite (requirement) for students interested in continuing on with the main Patient Support Corps URAP project. You can read the main project description at the...

Jill Berrick - Professor, Social Welfare

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: Off Campus

I am engaged in research that examines state policies regarding the imposition of child support payments for parents whose children are in foster care. An obscure federal policy allows states to charge parents when their children are placed in foster care. My work focuses on examining these policies across states...

Jill Berrick - Professor, Social Welfare

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: Off Campus

The U.S. is the only country in the world that has not signed the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. The position of children in this country is therefore ambiguous and contested. Examining news stories that pertain to children and families over the past five years, this study...

Jill Berrick - Professor, Social Welfare

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: Off Campus

When children are adopted from foster care, most states legally change the last name of the child to match the last name of the adoptive parent(s). In addition, states are required to produce a new birth certificate that changes the name of the birthing parent (and the second parent...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

1) Rapid Reviews\ Infectious Diseases (RR\ID) 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 infectious disease-related research. RR\ID...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

In addition to applying through the URAP portal, please fill out this interest form as soon as possible if you are interested in joining us: https://forms.gle/1jsvCGKgj3rb6KZx8 Potential projects for AY 2026-27 · We are interested in direct application of both home grown and other tools in building out (fine...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Psychiatric disorders, including PTSD, depression, 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 some people suffering from these disorders. Nevertheless, many patients do not respond adequately or cannot tolerate the side-effects accompanying...

Stephen Best - Professor, Townsend Center

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

The Undergraduate Humanities Writer covers humanities-related events and programs at Berkeley's Townsend Center for the Humanities and across campus...

David Bilder - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 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...

Benjamin Blackman - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 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. Understanding how these adaptations to climate variation across space have evolved will help us understand mechanisms by which plants can evolve to cope with a...

Ned Blick - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

In my view, economics is a set of cognitive tricks and tools that help us understand social systems and make better decisions. But this is not how we teach economics. My goal is to design an online tool/course to help people learn these tools so that they can approach...

Joshua Blumenstock - Professor, Information, School of

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Street-level imagery platforms such as Google Street View and Mapillary offer an unprecedented opportunity to study urban infrastructure at scale. However, their coverage across cities in the Global South — and India in particular — remains uneven and poorly understood. At the same time, rapid urbanization across has created urgent and...

Joshua Blumenstock - Professor, Information, School of

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Sustainable sand mining is one of the most pressing ecological challenges currently facing the planet. After water, sand is the world’s most valuable natural resource – over 50 billion tons of construction-grade sand and gravel were mined globally from rivers and beaches in 2021, accounting for 85% of all mineral...

Rauri Bowie - Professor, Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Status: Open     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...