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...

Vinod Aggarwal - Professor, Political Science

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

In a world of rising inequality and globalization, international coordination on tax policy has increased in importance. In this project, I investigate how international tax coordination was formed between states and how changes to the global tax rules affect the international investment environment. I argue that the global minimum tax...

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 is the HazMat and CBRNE (Chemical, biological...

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...

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...

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...

Sergio Arroyo - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

The goal of this project is to investigate the role of cell-type specific inhibition in learning a sensorimotor task. We use calcium imaging and electrophysiological recordings with 'optotagging' to record the activity of specific inhibitory cell tasks as mice learn a cued go task. We aim to understand how...

Paola Bacchetta - Professor, Gender and Women's Studies

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

This project focuses on surfacing and centering the wisdom of indigenous women elders from Mesoamerica. The research includes library, archival, and database work, along with some transcribing of digital audio files. We will be analyzing and organizing narratives to surface nuance healing modalities that have existed for centuries and are...

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...

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

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

LitBank an annotated dataset of fiction to support tasks in natural language processing and the computational humanities. While it currently exists for English, we'll be branching out to create similar resources for other languages as well (including Spanish, Japanese, German and other languages). The primary research will involve carrying out...

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

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

In machine learning, manual data annotation is often required for training or evaluation. While there are a number of annotation tools available, most are focused on specific tasks or annotation formats, and often do not work well with multiple modalities (e.g., text and video). In this project, you will contribute...

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 frame, the poses they have with respect to each other, the boundaries between shots -- which opens the door to...

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

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

This URAP position is a placeholder for mentorship of a project of your design. If you are an advanced student in CS, data science, or another discipline with a strong computational background and have a topic of interest in the space of cultural analytics or computational social science, feel free...

Weihong Bao - Professor, Film & Media

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

This project research the history of modern Chinese media, broadly construed, that crosses over photography, film and theater, architecture, and television. I locate the history in late to mid twentieth century China, with transcontinental traffic across the Pacific and the Atlantic. The project engages intellectual, technological, and aesthetic history and...

Patricia Baquedano-Lopez - Professor, Education

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

Background: Mam is one of the Mayan languages whose ancestral community spans southern Mexico and western Guatemala. According to the Censo Nacional de Poblacion y VII de Vivienda (2018), there are 842, 252 Mam speakers living in Guatemala, with the largest communities in Huehuetenango, San Marcos, and Quetzaltenango. This project...

James Bayrer - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

The intestinal lining undergoes continual renewal, with a near total turnover of epithelial cells occurring every week. Powering this metabolically intense task are the intestinal stem cells that divide and restore the intestine. Understanding how intestinal stem cells can both contribute to normal homeostasis and the repair of damaged tissue...

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...

Jeff Belkora - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Open     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...

Matteo Benetton - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

The project is part of a large agenda trying to understand how banks compete in an evolving environment affected by changing demographics and the entry non fintech lenders and bigtech firms. One project is studying the heterogeneous preferences of borrowers and savers to explain the lengthening of the financial intermediation...

Adam Benkato - Professor , Near Eastern Studies

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

This project consists of two parts: the 'Open Archive of Middle Persian Documents' and 'Chorasmian Online'. The goal is to make primary source material and lexicographical material available to researchers online. We will probably work on both projects in tandem or on alternating weeks, as the tasks and skills required...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

Status: Open     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...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

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

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

Status: Open     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 some people suffering from these disorders. Nevertheless, many patients do not respond adequately or cannot tolerate the side-effects accompanying...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

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

Mexico’s public healthcare system has faced underfunding, leading to saturation of primary services and reducing the quality and accessibility for the population. Moreover, there is still a large population that remains uninsured. As a response, people have sought private services to cover their demands. In the last 20 years, Pharmacy...

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...

Benjamin Blackman - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 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...

Mike Boots - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Our research group in the Department of Integrative Biology researches the dynamics of infectious disease evolution and population biology in multiple insect systems, including Lepidopteran hosts (moths and butterflies). We are currently working on two interconnected projects: The first project investigates host heterogeneity by examining how environmental factors (such as...

Mike Boots - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Our research group in the Department of Integrative Biology researches the dynamics and evolution of infectious disease. Pairwise host–parasite relationships are typically embedded in broader networks of ecological interactions, which have the potential to shape parasite evolutionary trajectories. Understanding this ‘community context’ of pathogen evolution is vital for wildlife...

Mike Boots - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

The Boots' lab in the Department of Integrative Biology studies disease ecology and evolution across multiple systems, with research ranging from theory to empirical to field biology. This project focuses on the honey bee – native bee – virus field system. Each year managed honey bees in the USA face high overwintering...

Mike Boots - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Our research group in the Department of Integrative Biology studies the dynamics, ecology, and evolution of infectious diseases through various systems. Almonds are majorly grown in California and require mass imports of honeybees for their pollination. However, honeybees used for mass agriculture also suffer from constant exposure to pathogens. RNA...

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

Accurate road geometry prediction is a cornerstone for building reliable world models of the driving environment, which is crucial for autonomous vehicle navigation. This project aims to develop a model to accurately predict key road geometry features, such as road curvature and bank angles, using data from multiple sensors, including...

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

Design and development of a nonplanar vehicle dynamics simulator capable of accurately modeling and analyzing the behavior of vehicles on variable road surface geometries and conditions. The simulator will allow users to customize both the terrain properties and the vehicle configuration. Key features include: 1. Road Surface Customization: Users can...

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

This project builds upon an existing 1/10-scale off-road autonomous vehicle platform to explore and operate in unknown and changing environments, including sandy beaches, gravel, and forests. The control stack must make use of onboard sensors (RGBD camera, IMU) to map the environment and plan feasible and cost-effective...

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

The 1/10-scale Berkeley Autonomous Race Car (BARC) platform is used for demonstrating novel control algorithms and to support the vehicle dynamics course. This project involves building updated versions of the 1/10-scale BARC platform. While building the platforms the design and construction of the platform needs to be documented...

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...

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

Status: Open     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...

Justin Brashares - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Non-invasive techniques are increasingly valuable for ecologists to be able to collect data on the distribution, population sizes, behavior, and diet of wildlife species. The California Wolf Project led by Arthur Middleton and Justin Brashares at UC-Berkeley is teaming up with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife...

Robert Braun - Professor, Sociology

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

This paper explores the heavily contested relationship between German folklore and the rise of the radical right during the interwar period (1914-1945). One the one hand, people have emphasized that tales can induce democratic values. On the other hand, scholars stressed how fairytales inculcate radical nationalist feelings. We explore this...

Steven Brenner - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

Status: Open     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...

Travis Bristol - Professor, Education

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

Background: The Center for Research on Expanding Educational Opportunity (CREEO), launched by Faculty Director Travis J. Bristol, at UC Berkeley School of Education, uses research to shape policy and practice in service of creating opportunities for students and adults historically at the margins to move closer to the center in...

David Broockman - Professor, Political Science

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

Scholars and commentators argue that Congress is broken because both parties' politicians take increasingly extreme positions on issues, failing to listen to voters. However, these claims are based on assuming that politicians of both parties don't adjust which proposals they make as voters' demands and the world change. In other...

Timothy Brown - Professor, Public Health

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

This project will implement and disseminate the FUTUREPAIN validated questionnaire and implement an online intervention for chronic pain focused on the South Asian population. The project will us a phone app to collect data during the project. The project will use a cross-over randomized design...

Timothy Brown - Professor, Public Health

Status: Open     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...

Silvia Bunge - Professor, Psychology

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

The Building Blocks of Cognition Laboratory, led by Prof. Silvia Bunge, is investigating how we can help children learn to read, interpret, and reason with graphs more effectively, leveraging insights from cognitive psychology. This project involves behavioral methods. You can learn more about the lab's main lines of research here...

Roland Burgmann - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

Earthquakes are influenced by the properties of faults. Our ability to characterize fault zones and determine how they impact earthquakes is limited. The goal of this project is to perform a multiscale analysis of the rock surrounding faults and explore how it may impact how faults slip and generate earthquakes...

Sydnee Caldwell - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This URAP project exposes students to early-stage research on topics in labor economics, including the gender wage gap and wage inequality. The URAP group will meet once a week with the professor (Sydnee), for about an hour. During that meeting, we will discuss progress, and next steps. Each apprentice...

Stephanie Canizales - Professor, Sociology

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

UC Berkeley is a premier migration research institution with a wealth of knowledge that can be powerfully leveraged by local organizations serving immigrant families in the region. The "Supporting Bay Area Immigrant Families" Project aims to survey immigration-related research produced by UC Berkeley scholars to create a publicly available...

Yu-Ling Chang - Professor, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment

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

The California Work Opportunities and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs) is a welfare-to-work (WTW) program that provides cash aid and services to needy families with children in California. In order to receive cash aid, adult enrollees are required to participate in work-related activities. Non-compliance will cause a...