URAP

Jim Bishop - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

California Coast is dominated by streams, creeks, and ephemeral surface and groundwater flows that terminate in bar-built estuaries, many of which become seasonally isolated from direct flow to the ocean. Flowing water often seeps directly into the sand and may undergo significant reaction before entering the ocean; furthermore, there...

Jim Bishop - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

Status: Check back for status     

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

Roland Burgmann - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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: Full- no new appr needed     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: 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...

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: Full- no new appr needed     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 - Professor, 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 works on a wide range of aspects of scintillator science and engineering, from...

Bethany Goldblum - Professor, Nuclear Engineering

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

Scintillators emit light when excited by ionizing radiation. They are used in a variety of applications including basic science measurements, medical imaging, nuclear security and proliferation detection technologies, fusion-energy system diagnostics, etc. A database of scintillator properties is hosted by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (scintillator.lbl.gov) containing a variety of...

Bethany Goldblum - Professor, 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: Full- no new appr needed     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: Full- no new appr needed     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: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project will involve laboratory analysis of preserved plant remains collected from household contexts at a Maya archaeological site called Altar de Sacrificios, which is located on the border of Guatemala and Mexico. The samples were collected from a range of time periods, ranging from the Preclassic to the Postclassic...

Christine Hastorf - Professor, Anthropology

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

Plotting archaeological plant and animal food data in 3D from a prehistoric archaeological project located in the Altiplano of Bolivia. The goal is to have a working GIS data base of excavated material so that the distribution and location of artifacts and ecofacts can be visualized. This project is part...

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: Full- no new appr needed     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: 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: 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: Full- no new appr needed     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: Full- no new appr needed     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: Check back for status     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: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Our team specializes in the development, production, and evaluation of highly sensitive detectors, antennas, and readout electronics for a diverse range of cosmology experiments. These endeavors capitalize on the extraordinary properties of superconductivity and the principles of microwave engineering. Through the application of these cutting-edge techniques, we are interested...

Jessica Lu - Professor, Astronomy

Status: Full- no new appr needed     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: Full- no new appr needed     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...

Qihui Lyu - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

This project aims to improve metal artifacts in Computed Tomography (CT) images. In the presence of highly attenuating objects such as dental fillings, spinal screws/rods, hip prostheses, and gold fiducial markers, CT images are often corrupted by streak artifacts, making these images non-diagnostic and impacting the accuracy of...

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: Check back for status     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...