URAP

Reza Abbasi-Asl - Professor, Neuroscience

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

Deep neural networks achieve state-of-the-art performance in many tasks such as computer vision and natural language processing. Interpreting deep networks is essential for applying them to scientific applications such as healthcare. Two prominent approaches to interpret neural networks are saliency methods and network compression. However, both methods...

Reza Abbasi-Asl - Professor, Neuroscience

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

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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 a frame, the poses they have with respect to each other, the boundaries between shots -- which opens the door...

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

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

This URAP offers two related strands of research in computational literary studies, and applicants should indicate in their application which strand they are most interested in. The first strand explores the techniques that fiction uses to evoke suspense in readers, and how these techniques represent anxiety in fictional characters, in...

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

Status: Check back for status     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...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

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

1) Rapid Reviews\ Infectious Diseases (RR\ID) 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 infectious disease-related research. RR\ID...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

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

In addition to applying through the URAP portal, please fill out this interest form as soon as possible if you are interested in joining us: https://forms.gle/1jsvCGKgj3rb6KZx8 Potential projects for AY 2026-27 · We are interested in direct application of both home grown and other tools in building out (fine...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

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

Psychiatric disorders, including PTSD, depression, 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: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

In 2022, there were an estimated 1.2 million people living with HIV and 31,800 new HIV infections in the United States. The U.S. HIV epidemic disproportionately affects men who have sex with men and is defined by persistent racial/ethnic disparities. We have two ongoing projects evaluating access to HIV...

Joshua Blumenstock - Professor, Information, School of

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

At the Global Opportunity Lab (gol.berkeley.edu), we view the world’s most pressing policy challenges as opportunities to develop transformative policy solutions. Harnessing state-of-the-art data science, computation, and analytic tools, we generate insights and innovations that promote prosperity and expand opportunity across the globe. Our lab is currently...

Joshua Blumenstock - Professor, Information, School of

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

Over the past decade, the rapid proliferation of mobile phones, satellites, and other digital sensors has created tremendous opportunities to measure human behavior. These data also provide the foundation for the growing interdisciplinary field of computational social science. Non-traditional “big” data hold unique potential in developing and conflict-affected...

Joshua Blumenstock - Professor, Information, School of

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

Street-level imagery platforms such as Google Street View and Mapillary offer an unprecedented opportunity to study urban infrastructure at scale. However, their coverage across cities in the Global South — and India in particular — remains uneven and poorly understood. At the same time, rapid urbanization across has created urgent and...

Joshua Blumenstock - Professor, Information, School of

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

Sustainable sand mining is one of the most pressing ecological challenges currently facing the planet. After water, sand is the world’s most valuable natural resource – over 50 billion tons of construction-grade sand and gravel were mined globally from rivers and beaches in 2021, accounting for 85% of all mineral...

Colleen Chien - Professor, Law

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

Firms increasingly set prices that are personalized to the individual consumer, using automated systems that draw on people's behavioral and personal data–a practice regulators have begun to call 'surveillance pricing'. Lawmakers in the U.S. and E.U. are actively debating how to respond, from transparency and disclosure requirements to limits...

Colleen Chien - Professor, Law

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

The "second chance gap" is the gap between eligibility and delivery of relief from criminal records through expungement. While "Clean Slate" laws automate this relief, a secondary gap persists: many beneficiaries remain unaware that their records have been cleared. This lack of notification may prevent individuals from re-entering the...

Brian DeLay - Professor, History

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

Guns and power go together. Like today, most forms of inequality in the global 19th century depended on a weapons gap. The unequal distribution of firearms helped determine power relations both between countries and within countries. Where did all those guns come from? And why did some have so many...

Brian DeLay - Professor, History

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

Are you interested in history? Intrigued by the secrets locked away in old, handwritten letters? Do you want to help create new knowledge about the past through archival research? Or put technical skills to work understanding the past? If so, here’s your chance. Brian DeLay (Professor of History) and Julia...

Brian DeLay - Professor, History

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

None of the revolutionaries who transformed the Americas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could mass-produce their own guns and ammunition. They had to rely on the international arms trade. Aim at Empire is the first book to explore how access to weapons (or lack thereof) shaped...

Charles B. Faulhaber - Professor, Spanish and Portuguese

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

Data cleanup of the PhiloBiblon netgraph database of ca. 220,000 records in FactGrid: a database for historians. The software used is Wikibase, the same software used for Wikipedia. PhiloBiblon is a database of the Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan primary sources (manuscripts and early printed books) of medieval Iberian culture along...

Anastassia Fedyk - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This is an opportunity to work on technical projects involving ML/AI. The projects include: (i) working with a large dataset of over 400 million employment profiles (resumes) in order to understand global employment dynamics and firm performance by structuring and analyze the large textual data; (ii) building custom large...

Anastassia Fedyk - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This project supports Professor Anastassia Fedyk’s research and policy work with web development and graphic design. The project involves maintaining and improving policy-related web resources such as Econ4UA.org, as well as designing and running experimental RCTs and surveys (sometimes involving new websites, sometimes executing simple Qualtrics surveys). Finally, the...

Anastassia Fedyk - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This project assists in Professor Fedyk's more practical research, including not only her research papers but also frequent media interviews and the op-eds she writes for outlets such as Washington Post and LA Times. Example topics covered in this project include: Macroeconomic policies in the US and abroad; Measuring...

Anastassia Fedyk - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This project focuses on data: hand-collecting new data, improving existing data, and structuring large messy data. Today, very large data sets are often at the heart of many social science research questions. However, those data sets can be plagued by big data problems: missing data, bad data, duplicate data...

Heather Haveman - Professor, Sociology, Sociology

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

Together with a talented PhD candidate, I am analyzing a longitudinal database of articles published in the Washington Post newspaper from 1977 to 2024. Our primary goal is to understand how gender roles are portrayed in news media. To do this, we are using several natural-language-processing (NLP) techniques...

Julian Hong - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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...

Anushah Hossain - Staff Researcher, Linguistics

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

The history of the Unicode Standard – a widely-used text standard – recently became publicly accessible through establishment of the Unicode Collections. These materials reflect the information-gathering, decision-making, and debates that went into the development of the Standard from the 1980s through the 2000s. This project invites RAs to...

Anushah Hossain - Staff Researcher, Linguistics

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

The last century has seen an explosion of new script inventions – efforts by individuals to give their languages a visible language of their own, whether to record an oral tradition, assert a distinct identity, or improve linguistic fit. To be easily used on computers, phones, and across the internet, these...

Drew Jacoby-Senghor - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

We explore how motivated and cognitive biases lead people to support inequality, even when it's not in their best interest to do so...

Drew Jacoby-Senghor - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

For this lab study, we are examining moral decision-making within group contexts. Specifically, we are exploring how moral decisions are discussed and made in groups...

Drew Jacoby-Senghor - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

Some topics under investigation: - Do perceptions of hiring criterion vary based on preference to maintain the status quo? - Exploring the pitfalls of the hiring process and attempts to increase diversity - Why do supervisors assign more diversity related tasks to racial minority and woman employees? What psychological cost does this have...

Drew Jacoby-Senghor - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

Some topics under investigation: - What if fairness? Is fairness "equality" or "deservingness"? - Do people have different heuristics for allocating resources fairly? - How do deliberative processes shift individuals' preferences for fairness-as-equality to fairness-as-deservingness...

Yehuda Kalay - Professor, Architecture

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

How can AI help save lives during high-rise building fires? High-rise residential buildings present unique fire-safety challenges because of their high occupant density, complex evacuation conditions, and extended egress times. In 2023, San Francisco adopted a Fire Code amendment requiring automatic sprinkler retrofits in all residential high...

Shreeharsh Kelkar - Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Field (ISF)

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

For many ordinary people, the term "Cambridge Analytica"--even if they are not sure exactly what the controversy is about--brings forth some association with the topics of election interference, psychological manipulation, illicit hacking, Russian disinformation, and Facebook. The truth is that it had very little to do with any...

Shreeharsh Kelkar - Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Field (ISF)

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

San Francisco today has a thriving economy of self-driving taxis. Waymo, of course, is the leader but there are also Zoox, Cruise, and Nuro. From starting in San Francisco, Waymo services now extend to the South Bay; select Waymo customers and taxis are also able to take the freeway...

Michelle Koo - Staff Curator, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

The world's natural history museums are responsible for documenting over 2 billion species known as a result of 300 years of biological exploration of the planet. The information contained in museums include observational and specimen-based data, text, images, sound and video and form the foundation of what we know...

Michelle Koo - Staff Curator, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) is a vibrant research and informatics center for the campus and the natural history communities around the world. The world's natural history museums are responsible for documenting over 1.8 billion species known as a result of 300 years of biological exploration of the planet...

Jennifer Lewis - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

The plant pathogen Pseudomonas syringae causes disease in a large number of different plant species, using the type III secretion system to secrete and translocate effector proteins into the plant. Many of these effector proteins are believed to function primarily in the suppression of host defense signaling. However recognition of...

Jennifer Lewis - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

The plant pathogen Pseudomonas syringae causes disease in a large number of different plant species. Virulence is primarily achieved by the type III secretion system, which secretes and translocates effector proteins into the plant. Many of these effector proteins are believed to suppress host defense signaling. However recognition of these...

Cynthia Looy - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Pollinators are essential components of a healthy ecosystem and provide vital benefits to both plants and animals. The student-run pollinator garden on the south side of the Valley Life Science Building (VLSB) supports native insects, spiders, and other wildlife and is an environmental education resource for students. We expect...

Rita Lucarelli - Professor, MELC (Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures)

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

Ancient Egyptian coffins are covered with spells and images that work together as a kind of magical machine, designed to resurrect the deceased and guide them safely through the afterlife. Yet coffin texts are usually published as if they were independent texts, divorced from their physical position on the coffin...

Marisa Medina - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

There are a limited number of human omics datasets that include menopausal status information for female subjects and include enough premenopausal and postmenopausal women. For instance, multi-omics data has been generated for thousands of All of Us Research Program participants. We will compare transcriptomic and proteomic profiles of premenopausal...

Marisa Medina - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Not all women reach menopause at the same time. Some of this inter-individual variation is due to underlying genetic differences between women. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been conducted to identify a list of common genetic variants that are associated with age at natural menopause. We would like...

Marisa Medina - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Electronic health record (EHR)-linked biobanks, such as the All of Us Research Program, do not contain reliable information about the timing of menopause for most women. Recent studies suggest that physiological changes associated with menopause can be detected through longitudinal patterns in routinely measured clinical biomarkers (e.g., in metabolic...

Marisa Medina - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Electronic health record (EHR)-linked biobanks, such as the All of Us Research Program, do not contain reliable information about the timing of menopause for most women. However, clinical notes can give additional clues about the timing of this important milestone in women's lives. The All of Us Research Program...

Olivia Natan - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This is an ongoing project which examines the effects of market structure on the market for consumer data. The project uses a variety of data sources, including many through the UCB library. If you are interested in the nuts and bolts of empirical research at the intersection of marketing, economics...

Olivia Natan - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This URAP project exposes students to one or more of the ongoing projects in quantitative marketing and industrial organization, including topics on product variety, pricing, and consumer demand. Examples of ongoing projects include work on business models for AI firms, and consumer search and information processing. Projects will be supervised...

Laurie Pearce - Lecturer, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures

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

Are you interested in ancient civilizations and modern technologies? Would you like to contribute to the preservation of knowledge and cultural heritage? Do you have or would you like to develop skills with databases and project management? Research apprentices associated with the URAP project Ancient Texts, Modern Tools will assist...

Christine Philliou - Professor, History

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

This is a collaborative research and Digital Humanities project I initiated in 2020 and our team includes scholars in Greece, Turkey, and several other countries. We are reading Ottoman Turkish and Greek sources about the population of Greek Orthodox in Istanbul and creating data sets, and then visualizations and interactive...