URAP

William Boos - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

The North American monsoon is a band of intense rainfall that stretches more than 1,000 km along Mexico's west coast and into the southwestern US, delivering crucial water supply to the semi-arid regions of Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. This monsoon is a continental-scale atmospheric circulation that driven (more...)

William Boos - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

This project will use satellite data and a new network of hundreds of on-the-ground instrument stations to generate a risk dataset for farmers in equatorial Africa. Our research group studies the fluid dynamics of Earth's tropical atmosphere, focusing on the atmospheric waves and vortices that produce extreme rainfall (more...)

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

In this project, we aim to improve the energy performance of connected automated vehicles in real-world scenarios. The energy savings can be obtained by harnessing technologies such as (i) remote computations, (ii) forecasts, (iii) historical data, (iv) automation, and (v) coordination with other vehicles and infrastructure. We have the (more...)

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

This project involves work on the perception, prediction, and control stacks of the 1/10th scale Berkeley Autonomous Race Car (BARC) platform. The goal is to perform multi-agent racing on an indoor track with onboard sensing and computation. Students can expect to learn about advanced modeling, planning, and control techniques (more...)

Roland Burgmann - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

Iain Carmichael - Professor, Statistics

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

UC Berkeley and UCSF are beginning a new collaboration on several large scale machine learning projects for medical imaging in Pathology. The ultimate aim of this collaboration is to develop clinically impactful deep learning algorithms for disease diagnosis/prognosis using massive (e.g. 100,000x100,000 pixel) whole slide images (https://www.pixelscientia.com/article (more...)

Iain Carmichael - Professor, Statistics

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

There is an expanding effort to improve patient care and accelerate biomedical research through the development of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that analyze high-resolution images of cancerous tissue biopsies. As in all AI applications, data is the critical ingredient; our ability to develop clinically deployable algorithms is dependent on (more...)

Christopher Chaston - Research Physicist, Space Sciences Laboratory

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

In this project we seek to advance understanding of how turbulent electromagnetic field topologies may scatter ions in the plasmas close to Sun. This process may drive heating and energization of the ion distributions through this region of space and forces plasma outward from the Sun in the Solar Wind (more...)

Christopher Chaston - Research Physicist, Space Sciences Laboratory

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

Recent discoveries in near-Earth space have demonstrated a correlation between rapid changes in relativistic electron populations and the onset of intervals of electromagnetic turbulence during geomagnetic storms. Understanding the dynamics of these energetic particles remains an enigma despite decades of observations and theoretical modeling. Multiple processes have been identified (more...)

Christopher Chaston - Research Physicist, Space Sciences Laboratory

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

Understanding turbulence in fluids and plasmas is one of the great challenges of physics. In Earth's near-space environment, known as the magnetosphere, turbulent fluctuations in electromagnetic fields and flows transport vast quantities of energy inward toward Earth through a channel of stretched magnetic field known as the magnetotail. This (more...)

Christopher Chaston - Research Physicist, Space Sciences Laboratory

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

The spectacular display of light seen at high latitudes and known as the aurora is a consequence of the conversion of electromagnetic energy to particle kinetic energy. The motions in these luminous features are a marker for how the energy conversion operates. This project seeks to trace the motion of (more...)

John Chiang - Professor, Geography

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

Climate science textbooks attribute the seasonal cycle of climate to Earth's axial tilt, and assumes that the influence of Earth's orbital eccentricity is negligible. However, a recent study that my colleagues and I published in Nature (Chiang et al. 2022) challenges this assumption by showing that orbital eccentricity plays a (more...)

Jan Christoph - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

It is an exciting time in cardiovascular research: the combination of 3D imaging, deep learning, numerical modeling and high-performance computing opens doors to novel diagnostic capabilities. Our group develops computational and experimental methods for the imaging of the heart. We produce imaging data using fluorescence and 4D ultrasound imaging (more...)

Jan Christoph - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

It is an exciting time in cardiovascular research: the combination of 3D imaging technology, deep learning, numerical modeling and high-performance computing opens doors to novel diagnostic capabilities. Our group develops computational and experimental methods for the imaging of the heart. We produce imaging data using fluorescence imaging and 4D (more...)

Jan Christoph - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

It is an exciting time in cardiovascular research: the combination of 3D imaging technology, deep learning, numerical modeling and high-performance computing opens doors to novel diagnostic capabilities. Our group develops computational and experimental methods for the imaging of the heart. We produce imaging data using fluorescence imaging, catheter-based (more...)

Michael F. Crommie - Professor, Physics

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

The electrical conductance of 2D materials strongly depends on the presence of atomic defects and so understanding how defects scatter electrons is crucial for engineering the properties of 2D devices. Up to now, most studies of the influence of defects on device behavior have focused solely on transport measurements where (more...)

Michael F. Crommie - Professor, Physics

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

Moiré materials are a class of materials prepared by twisting two atomic materials on top of each other. These classes of materials have become a preferred platform for studying correlated phases due to their tunability of correlation through the moiré period. For example, non-conventional superconductivity, correlated insulating states, quantum (more...)

Michael F. Crommie - Professor, Physics

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

Air sensitive transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) is a class of material hosting interesting quantum phenomena, such as quantum spin liquid, Mott insulator, quantum spin hall insulator etc. To reach different quantum phases of materials, one important tuning parameter is the carrier concentrations inside the material which can be controlled by (more...)

Imke de Pater - Professor, Astronomy

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

Over the past years our research group has focused on observations of the solar system using ground-based telescopes equipped with Adaptive Optics systems, in particular the 10 meter Keck telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and the 8-m VLT telescope in Chili. Adaptive Optics is a cutting edge technology (more...)

Imke de Pater - Professor, Astronomy

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

Berkeley SETI Research Center (BSRC): the Breakthrough Listen project. BSRC is a world-leader in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence – the quest for a scientific answer to one of humanity’s oldest questions: Are we alone in the Universe? Housed in the Astronomy Department at the University of California, Berkeley, the (more...)

Bethany Goldblum - Research Engineer, Nuclear Engineering

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

Organic scintillators are materials that emit light when excited by ionizing radiation. They are particularly attractive for fast neutron detection with applications in fusion diagnostics, nuclear security and proliferation detection technologies, and curiosity-driven science. Our group develops new methods for characterization and application of organic scintillator-based detectors at (more...)

Bethany Goldblum - Research Engineer, Nuclear Engineering

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

NucScholar is a software platform in development for the retrieval, categorization, and recommendation of nuclear physics literature. The current means by which researchers and nuclear data evaluators identify and process bibliographic information is the Nuclear Science References (NSR) database, the starting point for all nuclear structure evaluations and a platform (more...)

Bethany Goldblum - Research Engineer, Nuclear Engineering

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

Effective nuclear proliferation detection is hindered by the need to continuously verify the absence of undeclared nuclear materials and nuclear weapons-relevant activities. Multisensor data fusion has the potential to provide an integrated picture of difficult to detect phenomena, where composite signals can be used as proliferation indicators. Recent developments (more...)

Christine Hastorf - Professor, Anthropology

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

This URAP fall term project be library based, reading through the literature on archaeobotanical organic remains from both the Amazon and Andean regions of South America to get the current assessment of where plants were domesticated and how they moved throughout the continent. The student will bring together a range (more...)

Christine Hastorf - Professor, Anthropology

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

UC Berkeley's McCown archaeobotany laboratory completes a range of archaeological analyses and research. This project will focus on visualizing the archaeological plant and animal remains that have been excavated across an early residential settlement using ARCGIS to create three dimensional distribution maps of the ecofacts to study past foodways and (more...)

Christine Hastorf - Professor, Anthropology

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

This URAP project involves first-hand research experience with archaeological plant remains in the McCown Archaeobotany Laboratory with Dr. Christine Hastorf and PhD student Elizabeth Dresser-Kluchman. The student will assist with the analysis of carbonized plant remains from the Gallina area in Northern New Mexico. This area was occupied (more...)

Christine Hastorf - Professor, Anthropology

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

(more...)

Amin Jazaeri - Director of Instructional Support, Physics

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

Students will design experiments that can be controlled remotely through the internet (more...)

Yury Kolomensky - Professor, Physics

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

Mu2e is a medium-scale Particle Physics experiment currently under construction at Fermi National Lab, with UCB and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as collaborating institutions. Mu2e will search for the ultra-rare process whereby a muon particle converts directly into an electron, without the emission of any neutrinos. Though not (more...)

Yury Kolomensky - Professor, Physics

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

Mu2e is a medium-scale Particle Physics experiment currently under construction at Fermi National Lab, with UCB and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as collaborating institutions. Mu2e will search for the ultra-rare process whereby a muon particle converts directly into an electron, without the emission of any neutrinos. Though not (more...)

Yury Kolomensky - Professor, Physics

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

Mu2e is a medium-scale Particle Physics experiment currently under construction at Fermi National Lab, with UCB and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as collaborating institutions. Mu2e will search for the ultra-rare process whereby a muon particle converts directly into an electron, without the emission of any neutrinos. Though not (more...)

Yury Kolomensky - Professor, Physics

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

Superconducting sensors, such as Transition-edge sensors (TESs) coupled with superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs), are used in many applications, from quantum computing to astrophysics to particle physics. For rare-events search experiments, such as neutrinoless double beta decay, a multiplexed readout is necessary for low-temperature experiments which operate (more...)

Laurel Larsen - Professor, Geography

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

We are seeking 1-2 new apprentices to assist with a synthesis and meta-analysis project examining the outcomes of low-head river restoration projects. The final deliverable for this project is the creation of a public database of restoration projects and outcomes to help centralize the available data on these (more...)

Laurel Larsen - Professor, Geography

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

California supplies water to nearly 40 million people, sustains the most productive agricultural region in the US, and supports a rich diversity of freshwater species. However, persistent drought, extreme floods, and widespread environmental degradation are exposing significant vulnerabilities in the state’s water management system. Furthermore, decisions over how water is (more...)

Laurel Larsen - Professor, Geography

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

River flow forecasting is essential for planning reservoir operations, defense strategies against flooding, and fluvial ecosystems management plans. However, flow forecasting is a highly uncertain science. One of the biggest uncertainties lies in resolving the timescales over which water is stored in the subsurface and time lags between perturbations in (more...)

Laurel Larsen - Professor, Geography

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

The Environmental Systems Dynamics Laboratory (ESDL) focuses on the interplay between biological, physical, and human aspects of the environment using a combination of physically-based and data-driven models. Research topics include how river deltas grow or shrink, how landslides occur and mobilize, how deforestation affects precipitation, and how to (more...)

Adrian Lee - Professor, Physics

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

We are working on precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the relic thermal radiation that decoupled from the primordial plasma when the universe was just 0.003% of its current age. Measurements of the CMB have been central to the formation of the modern picture of the universe, and (more...)

Adrian Lee - Professor, Physics

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

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a unique window to fundamental physics. It can be used to probe primordial gravitational waves, which are a distinct sign that the early universe has experienced an exponentially rapid expansion at its age of ~10^-32 seconds. The CMB photons also probe the properties (more...)

Adrian Lee - Professor, Physics

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

Precision measurement of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) have been a spectacular success. Measurement of CMB spectrum that beautifully matched to a black body spectrum confirmed the big bang model of the universe. Measurement of small temperature fluctuations within CMB allowed us to learn about geometry of universe, existence of Dark (more...)

Jessica Lu - Professor, Astronomy

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

My research group studies black holes in the Milky Way in two ways: (1) we search for stellar-mass black holes using gravitational microlensing and (2) we study the environment around the supermassive. black hole at the Galactic Center. Interested undergraduates may work in either of these areas. Possible projects (more...)

Jessica Lu - Professor, Astronomy

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

The Moving Universe Lab helps design and build the astronomical instruments needed to find and study black holes, star cluster, and galactic centers. We work on adaptive optics development projects on small and large ground-based telescopes (e.g. Keck Observatory). Adaptive optics systems correct for the blurring effects of the (more...)

Kam-Biu Luk - Professor, Physics

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

Neutrino is a sub-atomic particle that was thought to be massless. Recently, a new phenomenon called neutrino oscillation, a transformation of one type of neutrino to another kind, has been discovered in experiments. These important findings imply that neutrinos have mass and they can mix among themselves. Neutrino oscillations (more...)

Kam-Biu Luk - Professor, Physics

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

This project will provide experience with (i) high performance computing (HPC) on world-class computing systems, (ii) Bayesian statistical analysis, and (iii) neutrino physics. In particular, an established workflow that utilizes Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to simulate Bayesian posterior distributions from experimental data will be run by the successful (more...)

Eric Y. Ma - Professor, Physics

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

Highly sensitive microwave (MW) reflectometry, like those used in Microwave Impedance Microscopy for probing local electronic properties in solids (see e.g. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/350/6260/538), have been built with bulky, expensive, highly specialized, mostly manually controlled components so far. This project aims to explore the possibility of using all-digital (more...)

Eric Y. Ma - Professor, Physics

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

The future of work is being shaped by a combination of extended reality, robotics and real-time virtualization -- the “digital twins” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_twin). In this project you will design and build the digital twin of a modern Physics/EE lab that provides nearly real-time info on (more...)

Eric Y. Ma - Professor, Physics

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

Having a virtual assistant who has read and internalized decades of scientific literature is a dream that may come true in the next decade. Such an assistant will significantly speed up scientific discovery and understanding by human scientists, and eventually become agents of new knowledge itself. To make this a (more...)

Michael Manga - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

The overall goal of this project is to understand how and why volcanoes erupt. This includes what happens when volcanoes erupt under the sea, how changes in sea-level and lake-level affect eruptions, and how eruptions evolve on ocean worlds (e.g., Saturn's moon Enceladus). For the (more...)

Michael Manga - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

Long-Valley caldera is an active magmatic system in California. The goal of this project is to explore seismic attenuation changes with ambient noise seismic interferometry to characterize subsurface hydrothermal fluid/magma movement and surface snow loading deformation process. This project will use over 20-years of seismic data to (more...)

Michael Manga - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

Artemisia and Oblong are two geysers in Yellowstone National Park that ‘thump’ before they erupt, with ground vibrations that can be heard and felt from nearby. Bubble formation and collapse inside geysers creates seismic energy that can be detected by seismometers. The purpose of this project is to investigate seismic (more...)

Michael Manga - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

Mono Lake hosts some of the youngest volcanoes in California and one of them is actively sinking into the lake. The goal of this project is to quantify active volcanic deformation in Mono Lake and reveal the mechanisms that are driving it. This project will use InSAR, LiDAR, and geologic (more...)