URAP

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...

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

In this project, we aim to achieve decentralized multi-vehicle collaborative navigation in an unsignalized intersection scenario. We will utilize an existing (custom) simulation environment to collect data. The data come from the optimal solution of the centralized optimal control problem or the nash equilibrium solution of the potential game...

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

In order to mitigate risk during deployment, control algorithms for robots on extraterrestrial missions (such as the NASA JPL Artemis rover) must first be evaluated in high-fidelity dynamic simulators. These simulators must accurately model the robot dynamics within a complex, changing environment. The goal of this project is for...

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

This project involves working with an existing 1/10-scale autonomous vehicle platform to explore and operate in unknown and changing environments, including on sandy beaches or gravel. To optimize the vehicle for its environment, it is of interest to consider platform modularity and in-the-field morphability. The goal is...

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

This project involves building 10-20 vehicles of the 1/10-scale Berkeley Autonomous Race Car (BARC) platform. The platform is used for demonstrating novel control algorithms and to support the vehicle dynamics course. The goal is to also document the design and construction of the platform. Students will work at the...

Roland Burgmann - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

Earthquakes are influenced by the properties of faults. Our ability to characterize fault zones and determine how they impact earthquakes is limited. The goal of this project is to perform a multiscale analysis of the rock surrounding faults and explore how it may impact how faults slip and generate earthquakes...

Iain Carmichael - Professor, Statistics

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

Work with UCSF on large scale machine learning projects for medical imaging and text processing in Pathology. The ultimate aim of this collaboration is to develop clinically impactful deep learning algorithms for disease diagnosis/prognosis using massive (e.g. 100,000x100,000 pixel) whole slide images (https://www.pixelscientia.com/article-finding-prognostic-patterns-in...

Iain Carmichael - Professor, Statistics

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

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

John Chiang - Professor, Geography

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

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

Jan Christoph - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Michael F. Crommie - Professor, Physics

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

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

Michael F. Crommie - Professor, Physics

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

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

Michael F. Crommie - Professor, Physics

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

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

Bethany Goldblum - Research Engineer, Nuclear Engineering

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

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

Bethany Goldblum - Research Engineer, Nuclear Engineering

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

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

Bethany Goldblum - Research Engineer, Nuclear Engineering

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

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

Venkatesan Guruswami - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

Computer-assisted and automated theorem proving has been a longstanding goal of artificial intelligence and has gained increasing importance in recent years. Despite notable advancements, such as AlphaProof from Google DeepMind, which achieves silver-medal standard in solving International Mathematical Olympiad problems, challenges persist in obtaining machine-verifiable theorems and...

Christine Hastorf - Professor, Anthropology

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

This URAP project will be working with Professor Hastorf on plant material from the Bolivian highlands that will be processed for stable isotope analysis in order to identify and model the impact of fertilizer on Zea mays, maize, that can be applied on archaeobotanical material...

Christine Hastorf - Professor, Anthropology

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

UC Berkeley's McCown archaeobotany laboratory completes a range of archaeological analyses and research. This project will focus organizing and editing plant type collections in order to clarify the digital file, prepare them for herbaria or dispose of them...

Christine Hastorf - Professor, Anthropology

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

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Amin Jazaeri - Director of Instructional Support, Physics

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

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

Yury Kolomensky - Professor, Physics

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

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

Yury Kolomensky - Professor, Physics

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

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

Yury Kolomensky - Professor, Physics

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

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

Yury Kolomensky - Professor, Physics

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

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

Laurel Larsen - Professor, Geography

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

The Okavango Delta in Botswana is one of the world’s largest and most significant wetlands. Land-use changes in its headwaters and climate change are altering its patterns of inundation, with potential consequences for wildlife and human livelihoods. Due to the vastness and remoteness of the Okavango, however, its changing...

Laurel Larsen - Professor, Geography

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

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

Laurel Larsen - Professor, Geography

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

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

Laurel Larsen - Professor, Geography

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

The Environmental Systems Dynamics Laboratory (ESDL) focuses on the interplay between biological, physical, and human aspects of the environment using a combination of physically-based and data-driven models. This internship aims to expand on our current work exploring the use of deep learning for environmental predictions. Deep learning methods...

Adrian Lee - Professor, Physics

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

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

Adrian Lee - Professor, Physics

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

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

Adrian Lee - Professor, Physics

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

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

Jessica Lu - Professor, Astronomy

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

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

Jessica Lu - Professor, Astronomy

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

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

Kam-Biu Luk - Professor, Physics

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

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

Kam-Biu Luk - Professor, Physics

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

We are active in a number of different areas of data analysis, using data from the DUNE near and far detector prototypes, using data from the T2K experiment, and with simulation studies in planning for the upcoming DUNE experiment. Potential analysis work includes tasks focused on the use of machine...

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...

Michael Manga - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

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

Michael Manga - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

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

Michael Manga - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

Olivine-rich rocks, such as those from the mantle, react with water to form serpentine, other minerals, and release hydrogen. There is a large volume change from this reaction. Stresses from volume changes can create cracks which enable water to enter the rock. This project seeks to unravel the history...

Michael Manga - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

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

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...