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...

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...

Colette (Coco) Auerswald - Professor, Public Health

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

BACKGROUND 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 that have a deep commitment to ending youth homelessness. This includes youth community...

Doris Bachtrog - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     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...

Jeff Belkora - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

INDICATION OF INTEREST - JANUARY 12, 2026: Fill out this form ASAP so I can contact you during the application period about an information session and other topics: https://forms.gle/eYRcXJFNAVSub3T4A **** STUDENT TESTIMONIALS “This apprenticeship has been the highlight of my time at Berkeley. It has given me a chance to...

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 infections disease-related research. RR\ID takes a transdisciplinary approach to discuss, curate...

Charles Briggs - Professor, Latinx Research Center

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

Project Title: Documenting Latinx Contributions to Health Care Access and Services “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...

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...

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...

William Dow, Public Health

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

Robert Dudley - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Flying insects are the most diverse and abundant form of animal life in the terrestrial biosphere. However, the origins of insect flight remain obscure given the absence of a transitional fossil record. This project will involve construction of a small robot that mimics the likely morphology of early insects, and...

Moisés Expósito-Alonso - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

International conservation policies including the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework now consider genetic diversity of wild species in their targets. However, scalable, theory-driven tools to assess and predict genetic diversity loss are still emerging, limiting their use in conservation planning. Analogous to the species-area relationship, recent work has...

Paul Fine - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

High in the rainforest canopy, epiphytic plants face the challenge of obtaining the nutrients they need without having contact with the soil. This project investigates nutrient acquisition challenges and strategies between epiphytic plants found in two different forest types in the Peruvian Amazon: relatively nutrient-rich forests with a clay...

Brent Fulton - Associate Director, Public Health

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

Healthcare providers and insurers have consolidated in the past decade, leading to higher prices without a commensurate increase in quality. The study will extend the evidence base on the effects of healthcare consolidation, including understanding the impacts of hospital-to-hospital affiliations and the impacts of private equity firms acquiring...

Brent Fulton - Associate Director, Public Health

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

In the United States, government spending on programs (excluding health programs) targeting low-income populations total about $450 billion per year, whereas personal savings in the U.S. totals about $1 trillion per year. Hence, the potential for private investment to improve equity is significant, but would be the rate of...

Scott Geller - Research Scientist, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

We are a campus research unit located in Barker Hall at the Northwest corner of the UC Berkeley campus. We support primarily on-campus molecular scientists and related professionals (graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, staff, etc) with their DNA sequencing and analysis needs. As DNA sequencing technologies continually advance, so...

Xiaohua Gong - Professor, Optometry

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

The research in the lab has been directed to study molecular and cellular mechanisms that regulate the development of the eye and the lens and to investigate the underlying mechanisms of different eye diseases including cataract and retinal degeneration by using techniques from the fields of molecular and cellular biology...

Xiaohua Gong - Professor, Optometry

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

This project will mainly focus on RNA sequencing and differential expression analysis for comparing genetically mutated mice with wild-type mice. It aims to find target genes involved in cataract formation, retinal degeneration and lens growth...

Richard Harland - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

The focus of the lab is to understand development; that is, the molecular mechanisms that orchestrate how a single cell (the egg) transforms into an adult animal with a multitude of functioning organs, following a specific body plan. The first milestone in the establishment of the body plan is to...

Richard Harland - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Sleep has been shown to be crucial to animal life. Moreover, sleep deprivation during the development of the fetus leads to emotional and cognitive effects in the offspring later in life. Unfortunately, the mechanism behind these behaviors are not defined due to the technical and ethical impediments related to human...

Richard Harland - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Though sleep is pervasive across animals, the core function of this deeply conserved behavior remains unknown. Sleep has been hypothesized to serve many roles, from the replenishing of molecules consumed during periods of activity, to the facilitation of learning and the formation of long term memories. Recently, colleagues and I...

Allison Harvey - Professor, Psychology

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

This is a large-scale clinical trial led by the Golden Bear Sleep & Mood Research Clinic (PI: Dr. Allison Harvey) in the Department of Psychology. The goal of the NIA (National Institute of Aging) study is improve sleep and circadian functioning, daytime functioning, and well-being for midlife and older...

Peng He - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

This project provides a hands-on introduction to benchmarking or advancing state-of-the-art computational tools used in single-cell and spatial transcriptomics analysis. With the rapid growth of available software and datasets, there is a pressing need to evaluate, compare, and optimize tools across a wide range of...

Peng He - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

The map of cells in our body is far from being complete. This project is a computational and conceptual exploration of human biology through the lens of integrated single-cell atlases. Students will collect and reanalyze published single-cell and single-nucleus RNA-seq datasets to discover rare or underappreciated...

Peng He - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

This project investigates how cells behave and interact in their native environments by analyzing spatial gene expression data. Interns will use Visium and Xenium spatial transcriptomics datasets to identify tissue microenvironments, reconstruct 3D spatial maps, and apply computational tools like NicheFormer, and contribute to research articles by generating publication-grade...

Peng He - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

This project focuses on the discovery, optimization, and interpretation of gene signatures in massive single-cell and spatial transcriptomics datasets. Students will contribute to the development of scalable computational methods to extract meaningful biological patterns across thousands of samples and millions of cells. The research involves both algorithm development and...

Julian Hong - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

The Hong lab is part of the UCSF Department of Radiation Oncology and Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute. We focus on combining clinical domain knowledge with data science to generate insights from real world data, develop actionable computational tools, and evaluate the benefit of these advances for personalized cancer care...

Guo Huang - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

As shown in our recent publication (Hirose*, Payumo*, et al Science 2019), we aim to understand the divergent regenerative potential in ontogeny and phylogeny. For example, heart regeneration is remarkably robust in adult zebrafish and newborn mice while very limited in adult mammals. We use the heart as a model...

Guo Huang - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

We aim to study whether there are extreme physiological phenomena (1) in individuals with healthy low heart rates (less than 45 beats/min) and (2) among identical twins that can not be explained by any known biological mechanism. We will exploit classical and non-classical model systems to explore these...

Guo Huang - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Current studies of mouse heart regeneration are largely limited to postmortem analysis of heart tissue to explore cellular activity and molecular mechanisms. We aim to combine a novel imaging window system designed and surgically implanted on the mouse chest by the Huang Lab at UCSF with the free-space angular...

Guo Huang - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

There are emerging AI-trained models that integrate tremendous genomic, genetic and gene expression datasets to successfully predict complex gene networks and functional outcomes after in silico gene perturbation. Now we are exploring these models to understand organ physiology and pathology from developmental and evolutionary perspectives. ------------------------- Publications from previous URAP...

Layla Kwong - Professor, Public Health

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

In an effort to understand how different cooling interventions can impact indoor heat among tin shed homes in Dhaka, Bangladesh. We have collected sociodemographic, physical and mental health, and sleep data, as well as temperature, humidity, and wind speed...

Barbara Laraia - Professor, Public Health

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

As human life spans increase, so do the risk of developing chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases. For example, cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death among women. These chronic conditions can take a lifetime to develop. Poor quality diets, stress, eating patterns and socioeconomic...

Peggy G. Lemaux - Professor of Cooperative Extension, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

General Description and Research Approach. Were heat waves or intense rainfall events common when you were growing up? Now, these events are common due to effects of climate change. These events include heatwaves, more severe and frequent rainstorms, increased wildfires and droughts. Recent Los Angeles fires are an example of...

Meng C. Lin - Professor, Optometry

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

Dry eye disease (DED) is pervasive with some reports estimating over 16 million adults diagnosed with DED in the United States. It has been well documented that race, sex, systemic conditions, medications, and contact lens use are among the risk factors for DED. There are numerous dry eye questionnaires and...

Meng C. Lin - Professor, Optometry

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

This research investigates the fascinating impact of aging on the morphology of the Meibomian gland (MG), which plays a pivotal role in Ocular Surface Disease. Traditionally, clinicians have employed subjective methods to identify and grade MG features such as atrophy, tortuosity, length, width, and ghosting. At the exciting crossroads of...

John Liu - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common primary brain cancer. Despite decades of research to better treat this cancer, most patients unfortunately die within 2 years of diagnosis. Surgery followed by radiation therapy and chemotherapy comprise the standard of care for patients with GBM, but resistant to treatment poses a major...

Gabriel Loeb - Professor, Medicine, UCSF

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

I am a scientist and physician with a broad interest in mechanisms underlying human disease. Our laboratory studies genetic mechanisms underlying kidney disease and develops approaches to discover novel disease mechanisms that are broadly applicable to many human diseases. Many of the genetic variants (changes in the genome) which contribute...

Marisa Medina - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

A subset of women experience an accelerated rise in certain cardiometabolic risk factors around the time of menopause, increasing their risk for heart disease and other conditions. We would like to discover why some women experience dramatic changes while others are relatively protected...

Guanghan Meng - Professor, Optometry

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

The photopigments in the human retina are capable of absorbing two photons of the same wavelength simultaneously to create a visual sensation, named "two-photon vision". This sensation matches the appearance of light at approximately half the original wavelength. For instance, the absorption of two infrared photons can generate a...

Rasmus Nielsen - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     

The Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization (FISH) technique is a molecular cytogenetic method used to detect and localize the presence or absence of specific DNA sequences on chromosomes. It is widely used for karyotyping to visualize and map chromosomal abnormalities such as translocations, deletions, duplications, and aneuploidies. In Nielsen lab, we've...

Peter Oboyski - Sr. Museum Scientist, Essig Museum of Entomology

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

Areas of the East Bay hills have been undergoing habitat restoration, which includes the removal of Eucalyptus and other invasive plants and the promotion of native grasses, herbs, and shrubs. This project aims to sample habitats at various stages of restoration to see how insects and spiders respond to these...

Peter Oboyski - Sr. Museum Scientist, Essig Museum of Entomology

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

Natural History Museums are repositories for biodiversity research, documentation of the impacts of global change, and a resource for new and innovative science. Managing these collections requires expertise in many disparate disciplines such as library science, anatomy & morphology, taxonomy, and data management. The Essig Museum houses over 5 million specimens...

Daniel Okamoto - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Climate change is dramatically altering the oceans. These changes include increases in sea surface temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, and primary productivity. We use experiments and field data to assess how these changes affect the physiology, growth, reproduction, and behavior of marine animals. We have numerous samples from past experiments and...

Daniel Okamoto - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

In kelp forests, food resources are a key contributor to a kelp forest inhabitant’s fitness. Recently, sea urchin herbivory has been shown to rapidly reshape the food landscape within these forests, converting areas of high productivity to desert-like ‘urchin barrens’. We aim to study food assimilation as it relates...