URAP

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 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...

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...

Vinod Aggarwal - Professor, Political Science

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

The end of the Cold War marked the beginning of an American-led era characterized by multilateralism and expanding international trade. This period witnessed a rapid shift toward greater openness, globalization, and opportunities for mutual economic gain. However, in recent years, there has been a notable rise in legislation and...

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...

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

Conformal prediction (CP) is a model-agnostic and distribution-free method for quantifying uncertainty in black-box machine learning (ML) models. CP can be used to construct prediction sets/intervals that covers the true labels with a pre-determined probability as long as the training and testing data are exchangeable...

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

Vision-Language Models (VLM) can support clinicians by analyzing medical images and engaging in natural language interactions to assist in diagnostic and treatment tasks. However, VLMs often exhibit "hallucinogenic" behavior, generating textual outputs not grounded in contextual multimodal information. This challenge is particularly pronounced in the medical domain, where we...

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Status: Open     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-shot performance of LLMs for various clinical tasks using real...

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...

Nima Alan - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Assistant will remotely call patients before and after surgery to collect data and will review medical records for retrospective databases. Assistant will also have the opportunity to shadow in clinic and assist with in-person research tasks...

Achinoam Aldouby - Curator, Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life

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

This is an archival research project focused on the photography archive of Roman Vishniac, documenting pre-WWII Jewish communities in Europe and American society. The project goal is to identify, contextualize, and create curatorial descriptions for the images, building a searchable database to provide historical context for future research...

Achinoam Aldouby - Curator, Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life

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

This project offers an exciting opportunity to serve as an Exhibition Research Assistant for a Jewish timeline exhibition at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, slated to open in Fall 2027. You'll delve into the extensive Magnes Collection to identify, research, and interpret objects that illustrate or respond...

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 related to patient outcomes after open scoliosis surgery: ranging from bioelectrical impedance gait analyses and assessments of fall risk to validating AI diagnostic tools and tracking frailty/activity levels/complications/pain medication usage before and after surgery...

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...

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: 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...

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...

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...

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...

Jill Berrick - Professor, Social Welfare

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

Transgender children are disproportionately overrepresented in the United States child welfare system and experience many unique challenges during their child welfare experiences. The state of California began collecting data on transgender children in the child welfare system in 2019, but before this data can be analyzed, social workers' use of...

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: 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. 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...

Anne Bloom - Executive Director, Law

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

The Civil Justice Research Initiative (CJRI) is a think tank that explores, through interdisciplinary, academically-based and independent research, how the civil justice system can be made more available to everyone seeking relief. The CJRI is chaired by Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and directed by Anne Bloom, an attorney...

Sabrina Boyce - Professor, Public Health

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

p><strong>Faculty Mentor:</strong> Dr. Sabrina Boyce<br> <strong>Day-to-Day Supervision:</strong> Ricardo Vera Monroy, M.S. (Data Analyst) or Emma Jackson, M.P.H. (Program Manager)</p> <h3>Project Description</h3> <p>Sexual and dating violence (SV/DV) and child sexual abuse (CSA) have far-reaching health and social...

Tolani Britton - Professor, Education

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

Given the limited work opportunities available to persons who have been incarcerated, a college degree could serve as one means to improve both educational and job market outcomes. A number of states have expanded access to college classes for incarcerated persons. In 2014, California passed SB 1391, a law that...

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...

Clair Brown - Professor, Economics

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

This URAP team focuses on the Sustainable, Shared-Prosperity Policy Index (SSPI) that pulls together the data for over 50 policies that structure how markets operate, creates government programs (such as health care, education, housing) and protects human rights, and supports healthy ecosystems and protects the environment. This year the...

Clair Brown - Professor, Economics

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

This project focuses on the Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act, which is currently a bill being considered by the California legislature. Students will learn about the bill, and add to the economic analysis of the bill that earlier URAP teams did. Here is a report on the Economic Analysis of...

Carlos Bustamante - Professor, QB3: Quantitative Biomedical Research

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

Optical tweezers are a method to exert force on individual molecules and directly measure forces generated during their biochemical reactions.[1] Molecules are tethered between double strand DNA (dsDNA) handles to micron-sized beads that are held in optical traps. The flexibility of these handles limits the resolution of optical...

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...

Tamma Carleton - Professor, Agricultural and Resource Economics

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

We are looking for highly motivated students interested in conducting research and analyses on a project investigating the impacts of climate change on human migration at global scale. This research initiative aims to leverage large historical datasets to empirically quantify how human migration responds to climate change, both within and...

Susana Chung - Professor, Optometry

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

This research project focuses on the understanding of how the visual system works in people with normal vision, as well as in people with uncorrectable sub-normal vision (visual impairment). Uncorrectable sub-normal vision can occur as a result of an eye disease (e.g. macular degeneration, the leading cause of...

Susana Chung - Professor, Optometry

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

This research project focuses on the understanding of how the visual system responds to the onset of vision loss as a result of eye diseases. By understanding how the visual system responds to vision loss, our ultimate goal is to develop effective rehabilitative strategies to help people with vision loss...

Susana Chung - Professor, Optometry

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

The research project focuses on the understanding of how the visual system recognizes faces and other objects in normally sighted people and people with low vision. Psychophysical methods, retinal imaging and functional brain imaging will be used to answer the research question...

Susana Chung - Professor, Optometry

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

Loss of vision in the central visual field brings about dramatic changes to everyday activities (e.g. reading, identifying objects). This research project focuses on identifying how the informative features of objects contribute to overall visual function, with the clinical goal of visual performance improvement by enhancing selected parts of objects...

Carla Cicero - Emeritus Staff Curator, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology is a major repository for surveyed and/or salvaged North American wildlife, especially California species. We typical have several thousand frozen carcasses at any given time, with a large diversity of amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds. These carcasses come from many sources -- wildlife rescue...

Anne Collins - Professor, Psychology

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

Computational cognitive models are mathematical tools that help us understand the underlying processes of human cognition. Researchers use these models to test different hypotheses about how the mind works. Traditionally, selecting the best model to explain human behavior relies on standard statistical techniques like maximum likelihood estimation. However, these methods...

Jason Corburn - Professor, Public Health

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

Urban gun violence is an epidemic in many communities. It has distinct racial and place-based inequities. A national community-based solution, called Advance Peace, is aiming to end urban gun violence using a healing-based approach. We are evaluating this intervention and asking: how does Advance Peace work? What...

Jason Corburn - Professor, Public Health

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

How are communities in the Bay Area addressing climate change and promoting social justice? How can community knowledge be visualized to inform climate justice? This project is evaluating one such effort sponsored by the California, Strategic Growth Council in Richmond, California. The URAP apprentice with work with the Center for...

Raul Coronado - Professor, Ethnic Studies

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

How can we write a history of Latine feelings? How can private writing give us access to how Mexicans in the Southwest thought about their feelings, their interiority, their sense of self? Knowing more about this can give us a better sense of two things: how have Latine communities expressed...

Clayton Critcher - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

In my lab, we work on a variety of topics at the intersection of social psychology, judgment and decision making, and consumer behavior. Almost all questions are addressed with the use of behavioral experiments. At present, we are answering questions like the following: *When do consumers defer to product-review...

John Alba Cutler - Professor, English

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

During the early twentieth century, Spanish-language newspapers played a critical role in publishing literary works in Latinx communities all over the United States. Hundreds of these newspapers have been digitized, with literally thousands of poems, short stories, chronicles, and serialized novels in them. But students and scholars have only...

Yang Dan - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Sleep problems are a common symptom of Parkinson’s disease (PD) and in some cases an early warning sign before movement deficits. Sleep problems in PD are diverse and can be made worse by medications that treat other PD symptoms by affecting dopamine or norepinephrine levels in the brain. While dopamine...

Arianne Eason - Professor, Psychology

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

Please fill out this form [https://forms.gle/h6x8aL7rirEDpvPo8], attaching a cover letter and CV/resume for consideration. Please also indicate what project you would be most interested in being a part of. If you have any questions, email our lab manager, Nafia Rahaman, at ucdreamslabmanager@berkeley.edu. Make sure the subject...

Arianne Eason - Professor, Psychology

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

Please fill out this form [https://forms.gle/h6x8aL7rirEDpvPo8], attaching a cover letter and CV/resume for consideration. Please also indicate what project you would be most interested in being a part of. If you have any questions, email our lab manager, Nafia Rahaman, at ucdreamslabmanager@berkeley.edu. Make sure the subject...

Alejandra Echeverri, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Traditional biodiversity monitoring tools, such as camera traps and acoustic recorders, are limited in scope, require frequent maintenance, and often fail to capture the full spectrum of wildlife activity. This project aims to transform how we monitor biodiversity by developing solar-powered, AI-assisted monitoring stations that can simultaneously detect...

Ofer Eldar - Professor, Law

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

Surprisingly, many large corporations across the world, are controlled and managed by nonprofit foundations, including Ikea, Carlsberg, and Rolex. These firms differ from standard profit-maximizing corporations because they are managed by nonprofits. The project explores the impact of foundation control on the performance of for-profit corporations, and the...

Jan Engelmann - Professor, Psychology

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

To apply, please fill out this Google form: https://forms.gle/hcSRC3KKoLkLJyWv5 We address questions about the evolution and development of socio-cognitive skills by comparing humans to other animals (mostly chimpanzees, our closest living relatives) and by studying how children develop. How do children reason? How strongly is reasoning embedded...