URAP

Laurent Coscoy - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a herpesvirus that infects 60% of adults in developed countries and more than 90% in developing countries. Usually, it is controlled by a vigorous immune response so infections are usually asymptomatic or symptoms are mild. However, if the immune system is compromised (for example in people...

Yang Dan - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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...

Robert Dudley - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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...

Jennifer Dunn - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

This project will take an interdisciplinary approach to study the phenomenon of health care segregation in the United States through historical and legal research and qualitative methods. Students will have the opportunity to engage in online and archival research, transcribe and analyze audio files of interviews, write literature summaries, and...

Moisés Expósito-Alonso - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

The global climate is changing at an unprecedented rate due to human activities, threatening global biodiversity and food security. A fundamental question in evolutionary biology is: What enables or limits species to rapidly evolve and adapt to changing climates? In this project, we will use natural ecotypes of Arabidopsis to...

Lia Fernald - Professor, Public Health

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

Around one third of young children in Latin America co-reside with a grandparent. Unlike other regions, intergenerational cohabitation has remained common even with increasing economic prosperity. Grandparents may provide additional care for children with time or financial resources, yet they may also be a burden on parents if the...

Lia Fernald - Professor, Public Health

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: Off Campus

Over 250 million children under five years in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have been estimated to be at risk of poor development, accounting for 43% of young children living in those countries (Lu et al., 2016). There are many reasons that children are at risk for poor development...

Lia Fernald - Professor, Public Health

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

In Kenya, over 70% of the population is at risk of malaria, with the areas around Lake Victoria and on the coast presenting the highest risk, and children under age 5 and pregnant women being most vulnerable to infection. Over half of malaria patients access treatment via pharmacies, which are...

Lia Fernald - Professor, Public Health

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

Background: Every seven minutes a woman is a victim of domestic violence in Brazil. Research on intimate partner violence shows that victimization is not an isolated incident. Because of the repetition of abuse, it’s possible that some women seek assistance from multiple sectors over the course of their victimization. Other...

Aaron Fields - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Many painful pathologies of the spine involve the first sacral (S1) vertebra. For example, damage to the endplates of S1 (in particular, the region near the lumbar intervertebral disc) can cause painful lesions in the vertebral bone marrow—such lesions are relatively common in patients with chronic low back pain...

Aaron Fields - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Advances in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology enable novel, quantitative, and non-invasive estimation of the biochemical composition of musculoskeletal tissues. The new ability to non-invasively assay tissue composition using MRI has major implications for understanding spinal pathologies related to low back pain, such as intervertebral disc degeneration. Recent...

Aaron Fields - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

The Orthopaedic Biomechanics and Biotransport Laboratory at UCSF conducts research related to structure-function relationships in musculoskeletal tissues, with a particular focus on the mechanisms of nutrient transport in bone and cartilage and harnessing nutrient transport for tissue repair and regeneration. The lab combines engineering and biology approaches for (1...

Aaron Fields - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

The Orthopaedic Biomechanics and Biotransport Laboratory at UCSF conducts research related to structure-function relationships in musculoskeletal tissues, with a particular focus on the mechanisms of nutrient transport in bone and cartilage and harnessing nutrient transport for tissue repair and regeneration. The lab combines engineering and biology approaches for (1...

Seth Finnegan - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

For tens of millions of years large parts of California’s Central Valley were flooded by the ocean, creating an inland sea with a unique ecosystem including now-extinct species of clams, snails, sand dollars, corals, and other groups familiar from modern California beaches. Some of the species that lived in...

Seth Finnegan - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Besides coral, marine reefs are made up of many other strange invertebrates, including the little-known “moss animal”, or bryozoan. These abundant, microscopic filter-feeders grow in colonies and build elaborate domes, lacework, and tree-like structures on the ocean floor, from the intertidal to the abyss, from the poles...

Seth Finnegan - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Death assemblages’ are the actively accumulating shelly remains of organisms living at the bottom of the ocean. Because death assemblages accumulate over 100s to 1,000s of years, they are powerful tools to estimate past biodiversity. By comparing the ecological composition of living communities and death assemblages, we can assess recent...

Suzanne Fleiszig - Professor, Optometry

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

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is the most common cause of contact lens-mediated microbial keratitis. Our lab uses in-vitro and in-vivo models to study the adaptation of Pseudomonas aeruginosa to the intracellular environment. Our recently published paper shows that intracellular bacteria persist in vacuoles, where they resist high-dose antibiotic...

Suzanne Fleiszig - Professor, Optometry

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

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is found to be the main causative agent of infection of human corneal and bronchial epithelial cells in bacterial keratitis and bacterial pneumonia respectively. To understand the etiology of chronic bacterial infection we look to determine the steps associated with intracellular biofilm formation by Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We aim...

Suzanne Fleiszig - Professor, Optometry

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

Our lab has shown that P. aeruginosa can interact with and invade epithelial cells to establish an intracellular niche. We have recently found that intracellular bacteria occupy a subcellular compartment where they resist high dose antibiotic treatment. We are interested in understanding the factors associated with bacterial persistence and enhanced...

Suzanne Fleiszig - Professor, Optometry

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

Contact lens wearers suffer a multitude of complications due to extended contact lens wear, including para-inflammation and bacterial infection. Contact lens wear alters the resident immune cells in the cornea specifically neutrophils after 6 days of continuous contact lens wear and this phenomenon has been observed in mice cornea...

Brent Fulton - Associate Director, Public Health

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

AI technology and AI tools will change the healthcare landscape. The purpose of this project is two-fold. First, the project aims to understand AI technology's impact on the broader economy coupled with a focus on healthcare, including diagnostics, treatments, drug development and workflow processes. Second, the project...

Brent Fulton - Associate Director, Public Health

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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: Current Term Now Closed     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 (but reached $2 to $3 trillion in 2020 and 2021 because of Covid/recession fears, which are...

Hernan Garcia - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Ultimately, in the developing embryo, cells make decisions individually based on local context. Individual cells don’t have access to the morphogen concentrations across the entire embryo. They can only be affected by the concentration of proteins in neighboring nuclei, and their individual response to signaling is crucial for developmental decision...

Rosemary Gillespie - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

This project looks at how communities of organisms come together, and the role of ecology (migrating into a community, trophic level) and evolution (adaptation and speciation) in determining the composition of species in a community. This in turn will provide information on sensitivity to invasion and probability of speciation and...

Rosemary Gillespie - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

No matter the size, all organisms interact with the world via their senses. Sensory input dictates reactions to stimuli, and the ability of organisms to adapt their neurological and sensory structures is critical to success and survival. Web building spiders in particular use webs as an extension and enhancement of...

Rosemary Gillespie - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

There are two key projects here: (1) Temporal Diversification and Evolutionary History of the Cribellum in Mesh-web Spiders: Webs play many essential roles in spider biology, including communication, prey capture, locomotion, and reproduction. One interesting morphological feature of many spiders is the cribellum, a plate located near the silk...

Rosemary Gillespie - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

This project focuses on the biodiversity of insects and spiders on Pacific islands. Biodiversity surveys often accumulate a ton of specimens, but it is usually hard to figure out what the species actually are. Many species cannot be identified because they are immature, or are not yet described. In this...

Xiaohua Gong - Professor, Optometry

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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: Current Term Now Closed     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...

Lea Grinberg - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Are you from Computer Science and want to know how to program in an agile project? Ok, this position is for you! We must have all our sample inventory organized… but it is time to be modern! We need a web application to do that! Do we know exactly how...

Lea Grinberg - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Background: Sleep disturbance is common among patients with neurodegenerative diseases. For instance, patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) experience excessive daytime sleepiness and sundowning. Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) features hyperarousal and decreased homeostatic sleep drive. Sleep disturbance generally precedes disease-defining symptoms, often by decades, suggesting that dysregulation of sleep is...

Lea Grinberg - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

The importance of histology to neuropathological research cannot be overstated. As a neurology lab, the histological characterization of proteopathies (including tauopathies, Aβ-amyloidosis, synucleiopathies, etc.) is core to our operations. From determining severity/progression of the pathology to identifying areas of selective vulnerability, immunohistochemistry and microscopy are critical tools for...

Lea Grinberg - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Despite intensive research on AD, effective disease-modifying treatments remain elusive, and novel tools for non-invasively assessing early brains lesions are needed. Our lab confirmed that the brain structures that consistently exhibit the earliest neuropathologic changes in AD, including neuronal loss, are not classically AD-associated cortical regions, but...

Karsten Gronert - Professor, Optometry

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

My research team is part of a handful of laboratories around the world that is focused on elucidating the role and molecular mechanisms of protective lipid mediator programs that are essential for regulating and orchestrating routine and healthy immune responses and neuroprotection. Research in our lab uses in vitro and...

Karsten Gronert - Professor, Optometry

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Assist in the preparation of biological samples, carry out solid phase extractions for isolation of bioactive lipids. Learn, assist and eventually run an HPLC-mass spectrometry system. The position requires a high degree of motivation and organizational skill as well as the ability to operate complex and state-of-the...

Karsten Gronert - Professor, Optometry

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

We are focused on elucidating the role and molecular mechanisms of neuroprotective lipid mediators essential for inhibiting the death of retinal ganglion cells in glaucoma. We are interested in using single-cell transcriptomics, proteomics, and lipidomics as a tool to investigate and understand the protective mechanisms in glaucoma pathogenesis...

Yangnan Gu - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

Plant's responses to external stimuli are highly dependent on the shuttling of intracellular signals to the nucleus, where the genome is reprogrammed to drive transcriptome changes to combat stress. A fundamentally important aspect of this process is the nuclear transport of stress-related signaling cargos mediated by nuclear transport receptors...

Yangnan Gu - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

The nuclear envelope (NE) is structurally and functionally vital for eukaryotic cells, yet its protein constituents and their functions are poorly understood in plants. We combined subtractive proteomics and the proximity labeling technology-coupled with quantitative mass spectrometry to understand the landscape of NE membrane proteins in Arabidopsis and identified...

Richard Harland - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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: Full- no new appr needed     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: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

We will isolate DNAs encoding cytoskeletal regulators, describe their expression, and knock-out or add back functions to determine whether they are active in controlling cell behaviors. Background. Amphibian embryos have been valuable models to examine the behaviors of cells that contribute to the shape changes of the embryo. The...

Richard Harland - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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...

Eva Harris - Professor, Public Health; Div of Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

With 3.6 billion people living at risk of infection, and approximately 400 million infections and 96 million cases per year, dengue is the most prevalent mosquito-borne viral illness. The disease spectrum includes dengue fever, characterized by debilitating symptoms such as high fever and myalgia; and dengue hemorrhagic fever/dengue...

Eva Harris - Professor, Public Health; Div of Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

The four dengue virus serotypes (DENV1-4) cause the most important mosquito-borne viral disease of humans, with 100 million cases annually. The mechanisms by which the human immune response to DENV provides either protection against or enhancement of a subsequent infection with a different DENV serotype are not fully understood...

Eva Harris - Professor, Public Health; Div of Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Previous studies in the Harris laboratory have demonstrated the ability of the secreted flaviviral protein, nonstructural protein 1 (NS1), to induce both hyperpermeability in vitro and vascular leak in vivo, both mediated by the disruption of endothelial glycocalyx components and intercellular junction degradation. Further work in the lab aims at...

Eva Harris - Professor, Public Health; Div of Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Dengue (DENV) and Zika (ZIKV) flaviruses are mosquito-borne viruses that are major medical and public health problems worldwide. DENV causes the most prevalent mosquito-borne viral disease of humans, and severe cases manifesting vascular leakage can be fatal. Nonstructural protein 1 (NS1) is a flaviviral protein that participates in...

John Harte - Professor, Energy and Resources

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Students will work with Prof. Harte to formulate and explore mathematical models describing ecosystems that are far from steady state as a consequence of human and/or natural disturbance. Testing of model predictions with available data sets will also be carried...

John Harte - Professor, Energy and Resources

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

Vegetation and microclimate data collected from Sierran red fir forest will be used to assess the role of environmental parameters (e.g., temperature, soil moisture) in successful establishment of conifer tree seedlings. The project will advance niche theory by examining spatially-explicit relationships between the environmental parameters and measures of seedling...

Cori Hayden - Professor, Anthropology

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

This project is a study of emergent and contested paradigms for understanding post-viral chronic illness. It has a historical dimension, a social theory dimension, and an anthro/science studies component. It focuses on how the proponents of competing paradigms are participating in a complicated public performance of power, legitimacy...