URAP

Dor Abrahamson - Professor, Education

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

We present an innovative educational design for basic arithmetic that responds to students’ documented difficulties with adding and subtracting positive and negative numbers. The design utilizes MOVES, a technological architecture that combines floor- and screen-projected interactive interfaces. Students enact arithmetic operations, e.g., “3 - (-2)” by walking along a projected...

Dor Abrahamson - Professor, Education

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

What do dancing and geometrical proof have in common? Turns out that in both of these disparate practices, we imagine lines to solve the common problem of perceptually engaging the environment to perform sensorimotor tasks. In dance, these lines have been called “attentional anchors.” In geometry, these lines are called...

Alice Agogino - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

Description: Squishy robots are rapidly deployable mobile sensing robots for disaster rescue, remote monitoring and space exploration. Our emergent technologies are at the fusion of robotics, mobile sensing, machine learning, big data fusion and smart IoT (Internet of Things). Our first target market is the HazMat and CBRNE (Chemical, biological...

Alice Agogino - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

Squishy robots are rapidly deployable mobile sensing robots for disaster rescue, remote monitoring and space exploration. Our emergent technologies are at the fusion of robotics, mobile sensing, machine learning, big data fusion and smart IoT (Internet of Things). This semester we will focus on smart sensor robots for early detection...

Alice Agogino - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

Project #1. theDesignExchange.org: (1) theDesignExchange: We are in the process of designing and developing the DesignExchange, an interactive web portal for the design and design strategy community. The DesignExchange aims to meet three needs: consolidate and organize the many design and design research methods used, develop a community of practitioners...

Alice Agogino - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

This research project originated from a longstanding relationship between the Pinoleville Pomo Nation from Northern California and an interdisciplinary research group from UC Berkeley. After conversations with the Tribal Council and researchers’ participation in tribal gatherings, issues around well-being, and education were identified as areas of common interest. One...

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

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

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

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

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

Large language models (LLMs) pre-trained on large corpora of text have demonstrated incredible capabilities across with zero- or few-shot performance in new tasks that differ from their pre-training objectives. In this projects, we will study the zero-shot performance of LLMs for various clinical tasks using real...

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

Institutional constraints and concerns over patient privacy impedes sharing of clinical data among researchers. High-fidelity synthetic data that mimics the real data distribution without revealing real data for individual patients can help empower and democratize research applying machine learning models to clinical problems. In this project, we will use...

Reza Alam - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

We are seeking motivated students to contribute to the design, fabrication, and testing of wave energy converters (WECs) for autonomous sailboat drones. The goal is to develop compact, efficient systems that harvest wave energy to extend mission endurance. Students will gain hands-on experience in mechanical design, marine engineering, prototyping...

Reza Alam - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

This project develops swarm of autonomous sailboat drones powered by a hybrid renewable energy system that integrates wind propulsion, wave energy harvesting, and solar power generation. The vessels are designed for long-duration, self-sustained operation at sea, enabling continuous environmental monitoring without reliance on external charging infrastructure. The platform...

Reza Alam - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

We have a few experimental research projects in the area of fluid dynamics, aerodynamics, aerospace engineering, and ocean engineering. These are serious research projects that potentially can be done by undergraduate students. By serious it means that there is a potential for publication or presenting your results in national and...

Reza Alam - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

Two positions available: 1) Design and fabrication, 2) Modeling and Controller Design Field Oriented Control (FOC) is an advanced commutation and current control technique that allows Brushless DC (BLDC) motors to run more efficiently, with a higher power factor, with smoother motion (less torque ripple), and with no compromise in...

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 frame, the poses they have with respect to each other, the boundaries between shots -- which opens the door to...

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

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

LitBank an annotated dataset of fiction to support tasks in natural language processing and the computational humanities. While it currently exists for English, we'll be branching out to create similar resources for other languages as well (including Spanish, Japanese, German and other languages). The primary research will involve carrying out...

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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...

Gasper Begus - Professor, Linguistics

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

This project looks at language in deep neural networks, LLMs, animals (whales, elephants, spiders), and humans. We model spoken language from raw audio using deep generative neural networks (GANs). We use audio, neural, and behavioral data in spoken language to better understand and interpret deep learning models...

Jeff Belkora - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: INFORMATION SESSION AUG 28 *** UPDATE 8/21/25: I will host a PSC information session on 8/28 at 6 pm on campus, in person. There's a challenge: I can't reserve a classroom (Berkeley rules for the first weeks of term). So I can't tell you the location yet. Also, the...

Lee Bernstein - Professor, Nuclear Engineering

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

The Berkeley Lab Heavy Element Group in the Nuclear Science Division is seeking a highly motivated undergraduate student to join our research team in developing innovative robotic solutions for radiation-intensive tasks. As a research assistant, you will play a key role in training a robot arm to build a...

Carl Boettiger - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Become familiar with the mathematical, statistical, and computational tools used in the group and learn how to apply these methods to answer questions in ecological research and conservation decision making. Emphasis on the use of deep reinforcement learning and best practices in data science software development...

Carl Boettiger - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Develop, test, and visualize methods for forecasting ecological variables such as carbon flux, beetle abundance, or indicators of aquatic ecosystem health...

Carl Boettiger - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Arid ecosystems such as the Mojave Desert are undergoing rapid shifts in climate and fire activity, with major implications for ecological resilience and species conservation. The Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment (DSE) is currently collaborating with the National Park Service to develop ecological models that simulate vegetation response...

William Boos - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 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...

William Boos - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 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...

William Boos - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

The coupling of rainfall in Earth's tropics with atmospheric fluid dynamics is a vigorous area of research; it is also enormously consequential for many millions of people working in agriculture in Africa and Asia. In this project we will use theoretical atmospheric dynamics, large satellite datasets, and new AI weather...

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

Accurate road geometry prediction is a cornerstone for building reliable world models of the driving environment, which is crucial for autonomous vehicle navigation. This project aims to develop a model to accurately predict key road geometry features, such as road curvature and bank angles, using data from multiple sensors, including...

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

Design and development of a nonplanar vehicle dynamics simulator capable of accurately modeling and analyzing the behavior of vehicles on variable road surface geometries and conditions. The simulator will allow users to customize both the terrain properties and the vehicle configuration. Key features include: 1. Road Surface Customization: Users can...

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

This project builds upon an existing 1/10-scale off-road autonomous vehicle platform to explore and operate in unknown and changing environments, including sandy beaches, gravel, and forests. The control stack must make use of onboard sensors (RGBD camera, IMU) to map the environment and plan feasible and cost-effective...

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

The 1/10-scale Berkeley Autonomous Race Car (BARC) platform is used for demonstrating novel control algorithms and to support the vehicle dynamics course. This project involves building updated versions of the 1/10-scale BARC platform. While building the platforms the design and construction of the platform needs to be documented...

Steven Brenner - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

RNA-seq has been widely used in biological and medical research because of its capability to quantify transcriptome changes. Researchers usually use their impressions and experience to choose whether to analyze transcriptome changes in gene expression or alternative splicing levels. A more systematic way to determine whether to focus on...

Steven Brenner - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

Genome sequencing identifies a vast number of genetic variants. Predicting these variants’ molecular and clinical effects is one of the preeminent challenges in genetics. Accurate prediction of the impact of genetic variants improves our understanding of how genetic information yields molecular and cellular functions and is an essential step toward...

Steven Brenner - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

Proteins often fold into compact structural units, called domains. Protein domains are basic units of protein function and evolution. Delineating domain boundaries is a prerequisite for further analyses of protein structures. However, this process is largely a manual process and the accuracy of these computer programs is still not satisfactory...

Steven Brenner - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

Structural variants (SVs) encompass diverse genomic alterations spanning hundreds to millions of base pairs and can profoundly impact genome function by disrupting coding sequences, altering gene dosage, or perturbing regulatory landscapes. However, it remains challenging to determine which SVs contribute to disease due to their complex effects on gene regulation...

Jan Christoph - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Our group studies heart rhythm disorders, such as ventricular tachycardia or atrial fibrillation, using computer simulations and imaging. Heart rhythm disorders are associated with abnormal electrophysiological excitation wave phenomena in the heart muscle, which can take on complex pattern-forming and self-organizational spatio-temporal dynamics. The excitation triggers intracellular...

Jan Christoph - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Our group develops computational and experimental methods for the imaging of intact, isolated hearts ex vivo. We produce 3D imaging data using fluorescence and ultrasound imaging, see https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07943, and we combine this data to obtain high-resolution visualizations of beating hearts and heart rhythm disorders...

Jan Christoph - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Are you a computer vision enthusiast and are you interested in applying your skills in biological research? Our group develops computational and experimental methods for the imaging of the heart and heart rhythm disorders. We have developed a novel panoramic high-speed fluorescence imaging setup for the imaging of the...

Jan Christoph - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Our group studies the heart from a complex biological system's perspective und we use computer simulations to study cardiac dynamics during disease and development. In the heart, electrical excitation propagates from cell to cell through ion channels and triggers mechanical contraction and deformation in each cell. This leads to waves...

Alejandra Echeverri - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

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

Ronald Fearing - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

We are looking for students interested in robot design, fabrication, and testing of pouch-based robots, for applications in minimally invasive surgery and beyond. Current surgical tools cannot navigate tortuous anatomical corridors, and as a result, accessing certain locations requires extensive tissue removal, general anesthesia, and a full operating room...

Emma Fraser - Professor, New Media, Center for

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

OSKI Tech is a program that introduces new technology to a range of students. It is designed to work as a portable technology instruction lab, with a focus on expanding participation in technology for students in media studies, new media, arts and social sciences. The core of OSKI Tech is...

Emma Fraser - Professor, New Media, Center for

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

Choosing your Major” is a Digital game competition aimed at undergraduate clubs and students with experience in making games, which will be launched this Fall. We are seeking two URAP students to help support the pedagogical and student-centered aspects of this project. The project is driven by a dedicated...

Liz Galvez - Professor, Architecture

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

Project Description: Cooling centers typically utilize existing buildings to provide air-conditioned spaces, offering citizens immediate relief from high temperatures. Yet, as an emerging architectural typology, many of these centers lack design direction. They are conceived as emergency buildings often without essential amenities like food, natural daylighting, fresh air, or...

Liz Galvez - Professor, Architecture

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

Project Description: This project addresses the challenges posed by extreme weather conditions and growing energy instability by exploring experimental approaches to managing interior environments. The research proposes architectural strategies that allow for multiplicity of indoor climates and environmental management. To bridge academic exploration with real-world applications, the project culminates...

Liz Galvez - Professor, Architecture

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

Project Description: From Wood to Tree is an open air pavilion that explores environmental methodologies for returning lumber to the forest by examining the qualities of deadwood and degradation as a possibility for design. Much has been said about the making of wood, and yet one of its most prescient...

Scott Geller - Research Scientist, Molecular and Cell Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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...

Paul Gertler - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

Passionated and interested applied econometrics, statistics, data analysis, and economic development ? Join us. *** Project 1: Hard and Soft Skills for Youth in Uganda 4y and 9y follow-ups*** Data has been collected, now we study the medium and long term impacts (4y and 9y) of two exciting youth entrepreneurship and...

Paul Gertler - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

Passionated and interested in Field Experiments, Research Management, and Data collection? Join a cutting-edge research team at UC Berkeley! Professors Paul Gertler and Laura Chioda are leading an exciting project to understand how innovative, data-driven tools can transform student success. The study evaluates the SC2.0-based continuum model...

Paul Gertler - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

Join a cutting-edge research project investigating the complex relationship between drug cartel violence and labor market outcomes in Mexico. This study explores the unintended consequences of a major initiative by the Mexican government to combat organized crime by targeting cartel leadership. Between 2007 and 2014, more than 164,000 civilians...

Peng He - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

This project focuses on applying and benchmarking state-of-the-art machine learning models—including foundation models like GeneFormer and SCimilarity—for automated cell type annotation using single-cell and spatial genomics data. The goal is to overcome the bottleneck of manual cell type labeling in large-scale datasets by...