URAP

Marika Landau-Wells - Professor, Political Science

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

Threat perception has always played a major role in foreign and domestic policy-making. From Covid to climate change to terrorism, policy-makers have made decisions about which potential threats to address and which to ignore. This project investigates how policy-makers in the U.S. and in other countries determine...

Marika Landau-Wells - Professor, Political Science

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

Neuroscientists have studied the brain's response to threatening stimuli since the earliest days of brain imaging. Yet there is no single catalogue of threat perception studies and their findings. Meta-analysis involves using data from many studies to characterize the collective state of knowledge in a field. This project seeks...

Marika Landau-Wells - Professor, Political Science

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

Social scientists often assign categorical values to text data in order to structure it (e.g., categorizing statements made by Congress members as pro- or anti-immigration). Traditionally, this coding has been done manually by humans who read and categorize the texts of interest. This method risks both systematic error (e.g...

Armando Lara-Millan - Professor, Sociology

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

Sometimes ideas about changing market signals can actually precede big changes in the economy, other times they can be too late, and sometimes those ideas can even cause changes. This project tracks ideas about three broad ongoing disruptions to the current global economic order. The first is that since 2011...

Armando Lara-Millan - Professor, Sociology

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

This project investigates the effects of market institutions on healthcare innovation and its consequences for inequality and wages. Specifically, the effect of the national medical code scheme on the ability of innovators to bring medical innovations (procedures, devices, diagnostics) to market. We will be assembling a large data set that...

Gabriel Lenz - Professor, Political Science

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

US cities continue to experience a criminal justice nightmare with high rates of interpersonal violence, police violence, and incarceration. When did this nightmare start? Why did it start? In preliminary work, I've found that this nightmare appears to have begun in Jim Crow southern cities around 1900. This finding suggests...

Gabriel Lenz - Professor, Political Science

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

Unions are one of the few democratic institutions within the workplace. However, the institutional structure of unions can encourage or constrain democracy within unions. I am interested in investigating the inner workings of union locals by collecting data on union local constitutions and bylaws, and collective bargaining agreements. Additionally, unions...

Gabriel Lenz - Professor, Political Science

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

Research apprentices will assist with a project studying the racial identity and racial attitudes of white Democrats. This group has become markedly more liberal on race-related issues over the past decade, and scholars don’t know exactly why. This projects help to explain this shift by exploring how white survey...

Gabriel Lenz - Professor, Political Science

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

This project has two parts. Part 1 looks at how the news media shapes policy outcomes and whether disparities in coverage lead to policy inequity. Can we show convincing evidence that news coverage of pedestrian fatalities leads to a change in local transportation policy? Are certain communities more likely to...

David Levine - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

Most poor women face challenges with menstrual hygiene. The results are staying home during one's period (limiting work and school), fear of leaks, infections, and high cost of single-use products. We are running two trials in Tamil Nadu and in Karnataka on distribution of menstrual cups. It would be...

David Levine - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

We are developing a curriculum based on stories, games and engaging activities to teach about health in poor nations (wash hands with soap, etc...

David Levine - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

Roughly 1.5 billion poor people receive healthcare from roughly 1.5 million community health workers (CHWs). CHWs are typically women with limited education and minimal training. ChatGPT, GPT4 and their peers should be able to provide high-quality support, especially if trained on the local clinical guidelines (retrieval augmented generation, RAG...

David Levine - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

We’re evaluating a program distributing free Oral Rehydration Salts (ORS) to treat diarrhea as an add-on to distributing seasonal antimalarials in Chad. We’re looking for a highly organized undergraduate to assist with document and data tracking, data cleaning, and project documentation...

Brooke Lober - Lecturer, Gender and Women's Studies

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

This project seeks to offer both a critique of feminist historiography and an alternate genealogy for Jewish feminisms in the late 20th century U.S., revealing both the presence and the historical marginalization of Jewish feminist anti-Zionists. To do this, the work offers a “history of the present” by exploring...

Kristin Luker - Professor, Law, Sociology

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

This project is part of an forthcoming book on how contraception and abortion, common parts of American family life throughout much of American history, came to be regulated in the late 19th century, became liberalized a century later, and are now the focus of intense political controversy. That regulation has...

Ulrike Malmendier - Professor, Economics

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

We are looking for highly motivated apprentices interested in behavioral economics or behavioral finance research for the 2025 fall semester. You will find below the list of open projects. Expectations: - Undergraduates will be required to complete assignments weekly. They will also be required to fill out weekly reports detailing the...

Ulrike Malmendier - Professor, Economics

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

One of the most exciting areas of research in economics is “Law and Economics/Finance." This research starts from a central question in economics: What are the causes of financial development and economic growth? Why do some countries flourish while others do not? The “Law and Finance” literature suggests that...

Angela Marino - Professor, Latinx Research Center

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

The Democracy + Media Lab seeks students with strong writing and/or digital media skills to assist in developing articles, visual media, documentary production, and podcasts. Successful candidates will join a team of other students to plan, record, edit, and publish research materials on social justice and democracy in the American...

Robin Marsh - Senior Researcher, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues

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

We are generating quantitative and qualitative data from several research instruments to understand the multiple impacts of women-led organic vegetable gardening in Western Uganda. These instruments include 24 hour recall and food security surveys, general demographics, gardening and welfare questionnaires, and narrative stories. This fall semester we will complete...

William Martinez - Professor , UC San Francisco

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

The present study is a randomized control trial to evaluate the efficacy and effectiveness of a school-based group prevention program (Fuerte) in San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Public Schools. Fuerte targets newcomer Latinx immigrant youth (five years or less post arrival in the U.S.) who are at risk...

Michaela Mattes - Professor, Political Science

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

Overview: (This is one of three pieces of a collaborative project between Professors Arriola, Matanock, and Mattes.) Countries around the world are increasingly confronting violent irregular threats such as insurgencies and terrorism. Yet, many countries have proven unable to effectively deploy their security institutions (including regular militaries, paramilitaries, and police...

Michaela Mattes - Professor, Political Science

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

On September 20, 2001, right after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. President George W. Bush addressed the nation and declared war against terror. In his speech, the President repeatedly used religious connotations. For instance, “Prayer has comforted us in sorrow, and will help strengthen us for the journey ahead.” President showed...

Michaela Mattes - Professor, Political Science

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

Throughout history countries have done terrible things to one another: genocide, war crimes, forced displacements etc. Apologizing for past wrongs was very rare before the 1990s and has become only slightly more common. Interestingly, there is a lot of variation in whether a country apologizes, when it does so, the...

Michaela Mattes - Professor, Political Science

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

This project synthesizes work done by URAP teams led by Professors Arriola, Matanock, and Mattes in previous semesters.) Countries around the world are increasingly confronting violent irregular threats such as insurgencies and terrorism. Yet, many countries have proven unable to effectively deploy their security institutions (including regular militaries, paramilitaries, and...

Line Mikkelsen - Professor, Linguistics

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

This project situates negation strategies in Kalaallisut, a polysynthetic Inuit of Greenland, cross-linguistically. One Kalaallisut negation strategy is to use a negative auxiliary, which is a rare strategy (only 4% of a 1157 languages sample has a negative auxiliary). Kalaallisut also has a negative suffix and goal of the...

Don Moore - Professor, Business, Haas School, Psychology

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

Have you ever scored lower on a test than you expected, lost a competition to a competitor you thought you would trounce, been certain about a fact only to have Google prove you incorrect? People are frequently overconfident. Understanding overconfidence can help us become more accurate about our self-perceptions...

Don Moore - Professor, Business, Haas School, Psychology

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

Human judgments are routinely biased. Can artificially intelligent agents correct for this human bias and achieve greater accuracy in their judgment...

Don Moore - Professor, Business, Haas School, Psychology

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

The scientific world is changing quickly as scientists improve their research practices and correct errors in the published record. This project seeks to test the replicability of published work that is now suspect. This is a chance to play a role in a project in the vanguard of open science...

Don Moore - Professor, Business, Haas School, Psychology

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

Have you ever read a research article and wondered if the authors truly tested the research question they purported to test? The focus of this project concerns the evaluation of research methodology. You would work primarily with a senior graduate student in the lab on her research. It is an...

Ilan Morgenstern - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This project explores how crime affects the operation of ridesharing platforms like Uber and Lyft. In many areas, rideshare drivers face safety concerns that shape how and where they choose to operate. Some platforms respond by allowing drivers to reject trips to high-crime areas or by excluding those zones...

Mahasin Mujahid - Professor, Public Health

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

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are a major public health concern. Despite overall declines in cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality over the past several decades, CVD remains the leading cause of death in the U.S., and significant health disparities remain, especially in rural communities. For example, rural populations experience higher rates of cardiovascular...

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 and AI Lab (DIAL) with PhD students and other research assistants in the Berkeley-Haas School of Business. The idea of this URAP group is...

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...

Olivia Natan - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

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

Olivia Natan - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This URAP project exposes students to one or more of the ongoing projects in quantitative marketing and industrial organization, including topics on product variety, pricing, and consumer demand. Examples of ongoing projects include work on optimal platform product variety, product bundling in video game markets, and consumer search and information...

Denise Neary - Director of Judicial Education, Berkeley Judicial Institute

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

The Berkeley Judicial Institute (BJI) aims to establish an effective bridge between the legal academy and the judiciary for the primary purpose of promoting an ethical, resilient and independent judiciary. By creating this much needed synergy between the legal academy and the judiciary, BJI also seeks to address the concern...

Moira O'Neill - Professor, Institute for Urban and Regional Development

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

California's housing crisis is well known, and scholars attribute this crisis largely to the inadequate supply of housing across multiple income levels. This study explores the relationship between local and state land use regulation and housing supply. The study has gathered data on approval processes in selected jurisdictions to understand...

Todd Olson - Professor, Art History

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

Beato Antonio Baldinucci (Florence 1665 – Lazio 1717), son of the art historian to the Medici court, was a Jesuit missionary in Lazio, known for his penitential missions, involving carrying a cross, flagellation and bonfires of the vanities. During these internal missions, Baldinucci carried with him a copy of a painting...

Todd Olson - Professor, Art History

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

The French Huguenot ceramicist Bernard Palissy’s is famous for his casting of living specimens (amphibians and reptiles) for his plates. He was also a prolific writer, revealing his research in salt flats and his observation of fossils in the mountains. Palissy’s Discours admirable (1580) is a dialogue between Theory and...

Todd Olson - Professor, Art History

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

Simone Vouet was an emigré artist in Rome in the 1620s before he returned to France and became a major painter in Paris, most notably serving Anne d'Autriche, the mother of Louis III. This research project concerns the artist's production in Rome, most notably his execution...

David Oppenheimer - Professor, Law

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

1) The Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality Anti-Discrimination Law brings together academics, advocates and activists from six continents to address issues of systemic inequality and discrimination. Much of our research, administration and leadership is done by Berkeley students, including URAP students. Our current projects include working groups on Sexual...

Felix Owusu - Professor, Public Policy

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

The criminal legal system is complex and involves several distinct government agencies that must coordinate to process cases. Bureaucrats and agency heads within these organizations can wield substantial discretion even without access to the legislative process or control over their budgets. Reform-minded prosecutors running of platforms of using their...

Emily Ozer - Professor, Public Health

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

Youth should be meaningfully included and engaged in conversations about policies that directly affect them. Youth-Led Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is a social justice-focused approach for promoting social change and positive youth development in which youth conduct systematic research and actions to improve their schools and communities (Ozer...

Emily Ozer - Professor, Public Health

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

This project is conducting systematic review of the literature to describe the state of the youth participatory action research (YPAR) literature and synthesizing findings of the youth outcomes reported in these studies. YPAR is an approach that engages young people as researchers to study and address social problems within their...

Emily Ozer - Professor, Public Health

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

The SFUSD-UC Berkeley RPP aims to: 1) Integrate youth voice and Youth-Led Participatory Action Research into school/district decision-making processes. YPAR is an innovative approach for promoting social change and positive youth development in which youth conduct systematic research and actions to improve their schools and communities...

Emily Ozer - Professor, Public Health

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

The Ozer lab works on multiple projects focused on community-engaged and participatory research approaches, such as: Research-practice partnerships (RPP); Community-based participatory research (CBPR); Youth-led participatory action research (YPAR). YPAR is an innovative approach for promoting social change and positive youth development in which youth conduct systematic...

Christian Paiz - Professor,

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

The University of California, Berkeley played a critical role in the development of Chicanx Studies and in the student, community, and labor activism that fostered the field’s expansion in the mid-to-late twentieth century. This apprenticeship project asks: what goals, contexts, and visions inspired early Chicano/a scholars at...

Christian Paiz - Professor,

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

This apprenticeship focuses on farmworker history in the Coachella Valley, a small agricultural desert in Southern California. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Coachella Valley played a critical role in the development, successes, and challenges of the United Farm Worker (UFW) movement, one of the most important agricultural labor movements...

Zachary Pardos - Professor, 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, 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...