URAP

Roland Henry - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

UCSF’s Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging and Department of Neurology are excited to offer a combined educational and research opportunity for motivated undergraduate students in the medical imaging research team. 3D segmentation of structures in the brain and spinal cord is a problem that deep learning is uniquely equipped...

Roland Henry - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

UCSF’s Department of Neurology has some of the largest clinical neuroimaging datasets in the world. As the director of imaging for the multiple sclerosis group, Dr. Roland Henry’s laboratory is in charge of making sense of this data and applying next generation analytical techniques to translate this raw data into...

Charlie Huizenga - Research Specialist, Center for Environmental Design Research

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

Existing airflow sensors are expensive, fragile and difficult to use. The UC Berkeley Center for the Built Environment has developed a prototype of an inexpensive airflow sensor based on MEMS technologies originally developed for 3D range finding. The current sensor is based on a highly custom PCB design. We would...

Charlie Huizenga - Research Specialist, Center for Environmental Design Research

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

The aim of the project is to develop a web-interactive tool that converts a user’s 15-minute data (i.e. Green Button Data upload or API request) into actual grid carbon emissions (i.e. using Watttime’s API). The tool will have data visualizations that display user’s electricity data and carbon emissions...

Charlie Huizenga - Research Specialist, Center for Environmental Design Research

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

In 2002, The Center for the Built Environment (CBE) developed a web-based survey to gather feedback from building occupants about their indoor environmental quality. Since then, it has been used in over 1,000 buildings worldwide with responses from more than 100,000 people. Although originally created for research purposes, the...

Charlie Huizenga - Research Specialist, Center for Environmental Design Research

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

Over 2 billion people in the world do not have access to safe drinking water. Many organizations are working to provide water systems to poor, rural communities across the globe. Gravity-flow water systems, where water flows by gravity without any mechanical pumping, are commonly used in areas with appropriate...

Yehuda Kalay - Professor, Architecture

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

The performance of healthcare facilities is an important issue due to the high value of the services they provide on one hand, and the high cost of constructing and operating them on the other. Various disciplines have offered measures to assess such performance, focusing on different indicators. The healthcare industry...

Daniel Kammen - Professor, Energy and Resources

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

California has committed to fully eliminate carbon pollution from electricity by the year 2045, by passing landmark state bill SB100. Alongside, several bills have been passed to move towards deep emissions reduction in all sectors, including buildings and transport. Decarbonizing existing buildings (around 13 million residential homes along with large...

Daniel Kammen - Professor, Energy and Resources

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

The technological basis for launching and operating orbiting solar generating plants is rapidly improving due to decreases in the cost of rocket launches ($/kg of payload), and improvements in durable thin-film solar and microwave beaming technology. The project is to build data-sets to inform a series of projections...

Daniel Kammen - Professor, Energy and Resources

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

The purpose of this project is to collect, analyze and visualize data on energy, transportation, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, GHG drivers, household carbon footprints, climate action planning, and equity into a single, data-driven climate action portal for all California cities and communities...

Daniel Kammen - Professor, Energy and Resources

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

This project focuses on assessment of energy system resources, GHG balances and design of regional opportunities for expansion of distributed generation and micro grids in urban-agriculture interface zones across regions in California and regions with similar geo-physical resources and socio-economic features. The project will use Geographic Information...

Galateia Kazakia - Professor, UC San Francisco, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

Our research group focuses on advanced imaging techniques for the study of musculoskeletal structure and function (for details please see: http://www.radiology.ucsf.edu/research/kazakia). For this project, we plan to use two recently developed imaging tools to investigate the structure and composition of bone. State-of-the-art micro computed...

Galateia Kazakia - Professor, UC San Francisco, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

Our research group focuses on advanced imaging techniques for the study of musculoskeletal structure and function (for details please see: http://www.radiology.ucsf.edu/research/kazakia). For this project, we will be performing advanced image processing and analysis on high resolution computed tomography (CT) images of the skeleton. These images are being...

Waqas Khalid - Associate Scientist, QB3

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

Be the first to utilize/use cutting edge nanotechnology developed by Dr. Waqas Khalid, Berkeley Scientist and collaborators to solve problems in healthcare, energy and semiconductor industries. Join Dr. Khalid’s URAP program and learn about nanostructure based devices that have applications in monitoring human health, energy harvesting, energy storage, environmental...

Mimi Koehl - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

We are studying the biomechanics and biofluiddynamics of how organisms interact with their physical environments. Our interdisciplinary work is at the interface between biology and engineering, so students majoring in biology, engineering, physics, or math have all participated in research in our lab. There are a variety of projects that...

Lu Liang - Professor, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning

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

The summer of 2023 witnessed record-breaking temperatures, with July being marked as the hottest month on record. The southern United States bore the brunt of this heat catastrophe, exemplified by the Dallas-Fort Worth area's numerous daily high temperature records—20 days surpassing 105°F and 42 days exceeding...

Lu Liang - Professor, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning

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

The urban heat island (UHI) and urban pollution island (UPI) represent critical socio-environmental challenges that have a global impact on cities. These phenomena, characterized by elevated temperatures and increased pollution levels compared to non-urban areas, are the result of significant shifts in human settlement patterns and associated anthropogenic...

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...

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...

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...

Simo Makiharju - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

Gas-liquid flows play an important role in the environment, and in many transportation, biological and industrial processes. The FLOW lab is presently studying 1) structures of gas jets in water, 2) gas entertainment by plunging water jets, 3) air-water flows for frictional drag reduction, and 4) forces on...

Sara McMains - Professor, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science

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

Additive Manufacturing (aka 3D Printing) is a set of relatively novel manufacturing techniques that were originally used for prototyping but are increasingly used to fabricate end-use parts, which requires higher quality manufacturing. The goal of this project is to build a machine learning model that can quickly and accurately...

Raul Monsalve - Research Scientist, Space Sciences Laboratory

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

The Radio Cosmology Group (RCG) at the Space Sciences Laboratory is a leader in the study of the first billion years of the Universe through the design and operation of state-of-the art radio frequency instrumentation to measure radio waves from space. We are seeking an undergraduate research assistant...

Priya Moorjani - Professor, Center for Computational Biology, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Our lab studies human evolutionary genetics using genomic data from present-day and ancient DNA samples. We aim to understand how different populations relate to each other and what are some of the genes related to human adaptation and diseases. To this end, we develop computational and statistical methods and...

Priya Moorjani - Professor, Center for Computational Biology, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Unraveling the first migrations of humans out of Africa has invoked great interest among researchers from a wide range of disciplines. With the advent of genome-wide DNA sequencing techniques and an increase in the availability of ancient samples, genetics offers important tools for testing different hypothesis related to human...

Abhishek Nagaraj - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This URAP project exposes students to one or more of the ongoing projects that the professor (Abhishek) is working on along in his Data Innovation Lab with PhD students and other research assistants in the Berkeley-Haas School of Business. The idea of this URAP group is to provide students...

Karen Nakamura - Professor, Anthropology

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

The Berkeley Disability Lab (https://disabilitylab.berkeley.edu/) has been working on several projects involving disability, technology, art, activism, and access in the Bay Area. We welcome students from all fields of the university (arts, engineering, social sciences, communications, CS, design, music, architecture, etc.), and people with personal experience of disability or...

Kara Nelson - Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

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

Direct potable reuse is a form of wastewater reuse where advanced-treated wastewater is introduced directly to the drinking water distribution system. Bench-scale reactors will be used to simulate drinking water distribution system pipes before and during the transition to direct potable reuse conditions. Microbial water quality parameters will...

Kara Nelson - Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

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

Recovering nutrients from wastewater can solve two problems: reducing eutrophication by eliminating nutrient discharges to the environment, and producing a local fertilizer that has lower embedded energy than industrial fertilizer. Our research aims to produce fertilizer by concentrating ammonium from wastewater and urine using struvite precipitation (for phosphorus) and ion...

Kara Nelson - Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

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

Despite being less than 1% of the total volume of liquid treated in wastewater treatment plants, urine is responsible for over 80% of the nitrogen in a treatment plants' influent stream. Commonly, this influx of nitrogen is only partially treated, leading to the release of excess nitrogen into the environment...

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

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

UCB campus: Bees are responsible for pollination of many food crops and native plants. Moth larvae (caterpillars) are important herbivores of native and domesticated plants. Both bees and moths, therefore, are important indicators of ecosystem health. We are currently working to take high resolution photographs of of the hundreds of...

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

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

The Essig Museum is part of an ongoing large-scale collecting effort on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. We are collecting vast quantities of bizarre and fascinating arthropods, some of which will be new to science. The two main goals of the project are to document the biological diversity...

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

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

The Essig Museum, in collaboration with several other California institutions, is building a DNA barcode reference library for all species of insects in the state. This includes extracting DNA from identified museum specimens as well as collecting fresh specimens from around the state. The end goal is to develop a...

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

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

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

Zachary Pardos - Professor, School of Information and Education

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

This project seeks to fill technical new researcher positions in the AskOski and OATutor research and development teams. The AskOski project (https://askoski.berkeley.edu/about) is a research and development effort lead by Professor Pardos to transfer the latest in big data and machine learning research to the domain of course...

Zachary Pardos - Professor, School of Information and Education

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

Adaptive tutoring systems are designed to provide students in K-12 and intro college courses a personalized homework experience. This means giving the right problem to a student at the right time based given a continuous assessment of their mastery of a skill. At Berkeley, the ALEKS system is used...

Saul Perlmutter - Professor, Physics

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

Our group has developed a new model for inferring the distances between Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) that is about twice as accurate as previous models. In order to determine the present day expansion rate, or the Hubble Constant, we need to determine a zero point calibration for the model...

Saul Perlmutter - Professor, Physics

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

Strong gravitational lenses are very rare occurrences and are a powerful tool in studying dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious entities that together account for 95% of the energy in the universe. The strong lensing team works on a range of projects with state-of-the-art computation/ML...

Saul Perlmutter - Professor, Physics

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

Type Ia supernovae are used to measure the rate at which our Universes is expanding, today and over the past 10 billion years. In the past we used Type Ia supernovae to discover that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. Now we have developed new techniques for making...

Saul Perlmutter - Professor, Physics

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

Sense & Sensibility & Science is a project which brings together researchers and educators to improve the way we use science to make decisions. Humans make decisions every day. As individuals, voters, and citizens of the world, the choices we make have the power to shape the world around us. The problem...

Amy Pickering - Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

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

The Pickering Lab at UC Berkeley is currently developing SOIL-SEQ, a hands-on education module for local high school classrooms designed to engage students in a crowdsourcing effort to provide data to better understand the spread of bacterial antibiotic resistance through the environment. We are using cutting-edge, portable...

Amy Pickering - Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

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

Soil-transmitted helminths (STH) cause a neglected tropical disease inextricably linked to poverty, inadequate sanitation, and unhygienic conditions. STH account for over five million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and infect around 1.5 billion people, representing the most prevalent parasitic infections worldwide. Classical microscopy-based surveillance strategies are suboptimal and...

Amy Pickering - Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

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

Wastewater-based surveillance (WBS) has become widespread in recent years for community-level surveillance of SARS-CoV-2, and it is currently being applied to many other diseases and public health issues. WBS presents an opportunity for studying and tracking antibiotic-resistant bacteria at the population level. We are working...

Amy Pickering - Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

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

Contaminated water supplies in health facilities place patients at risk for antibiotic resistant infections, leading to poor health outcomes. Globally, more than 20% of health facilities lack even basic water services. To provide low-cost water treatment, the Pickering Lab has been developing a passive in-line chlorination technology, known...

Alison Post - Professor, Political Science

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

When do voters elect medical doctors for office? Scholars focused on symbolic and substantive representation typically concentrate on race, gender, religion, or some combination thereof. However, historically, political science scholars have been interested in occupation as a salient category, particularly lawyers. With the decline of the politician-lawyer in Congress...

Alison Post - Professor, Political Science

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

What are the main types of concerns that citizens bring to mayors and city councilors in Latin America? What sorts of incentives do public officials have to address these concerns? And how do these dynamics vary between cities of different sizes? In this project, we will investigate local-level politics...

David Romps - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

This project will design, build, and test instrumentation to measure temperature, humidity, air currents, and infrared radiation in extreme heat and humdity. These instruments are needed for laboratory studies that will evaluate models of human physiology that, in turn, are used to project the future of heat stress on a...

Albert Ruhi Vidal - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

The flux of leaf litter from the riparian zone is a major energy pathway into streams, and, thus, litter breakdown is a critical ecosystem-level process affecting both the carbon and nutrient cycles as well as stream food webs. Leaf litter decomposition is influenced by litter quantity and quality (i.e...

Albert Ruhi Vidal - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

How could we best manage local water supplies in ways that benefit communities and rivers? Los Angeles County in Southern California imports the majority of its water. After residents use this water, wastewater treatment facilities clean it and then generally discharge it into local streams, such as the Los Angeles...

Albert Ruhi Vidal - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Climate change is shifting the distribution of the Earth’s water resources spatially and temporally. In most of California, multi-year droughts are projected to increase in frequency and magnitude by the end of the century. Predicting the impacts of drought on freshwater ecosystems remains, however, a key challenge. This is...