Project Search Options
Enter one or more search options below then click the Search button.
Click on a project's title to view more details.
Bassem Al-Sady - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: On Campus
Genes in our genome can be kept in active or inactive states in different cell types. Genes coding for opposing cell types are heritably kept inactive. This is possible because a gene repressive structure called heterochromatin can “grow” over regions containing these genes in some, but not other cell types...
Bassem Al-Sady - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours Location: On Campus
A family of small protein folds contains a binding pocket ("aromatic cage") that is conserved through eukaryotic life and recognizes chemical modifications to chromatin, the packaging material of DNA. These small folds can execute several additional functions, like nucleic acid binding, that appear critical to how epigenetic silencing is carried...
Nima Alan - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: On Campus
Assistant will remotely call patients before and after surgery to collect data and will review medical records for retrospective databases. Assistant will also have the opportunity to shadow in clinic and assist with in-person research tasks...
Biological & Health SciencesSergio Arroyo - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
The goal of this project is to investigate the role of cell-type specific inhibition in learning a sensorimotor task. We use calcium imaging and electrophysiological recordings with 'optotagging' to record the activity of specific inhibitory cell tasks as mice learn a cued go task. We aim to understand how...
Biological & Health SciencesJeff Belkora - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: Off Campus
INDICATION OF INTEREST - JANUARY 12, 2026: Fill out this form ASAP so I can contact you during the application period about an information session and other topics: https://forms.gle/eYRcXJFNAVSub3T4A **** **** UPDATE - JANUARY 15 - INFO SESSION **** We are tentatively planning an information session on Thursday January 22 at 7:15 pm in...
Biological & Health Sciences Social Sciences Engineering, Design & Technologies Education, Cognition & PsychologyJeff Belkora - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: On Campus
PLEASE NOTE A PROJECT-SPECIFIC VARIANCE FROM THE GENERAL URAP STATEMENT OF INTEREST INSTRUCTIONS IN THE DESCRIPTION BELOW. *** This project is a semester-long pre-requisite (requirement) for students interested in continuing on with the main Patient Support Corps URAP project. You can read the main project description at the...
Biological & Health Sciences Social Sciences Engineering, Design & Technologies Education, Cognition & PsychologyJan Christoph - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours Location: On Campus
This project is a joint project between the Christoph and Chuang labs at the Cardiovascular Research Institute at UCSF. The Christoph lab studies the heart and cardiac physiology using computational modeling and 3D imaging. The Chuang lab studies lung development using mouse models and genetics...
Engineering, Design & Technologies Biological & Health Sciences Mathematical and Physical SciencesRyan Corces - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours Location: Off Campus
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disease and is characterized by a loss of neurons and cognitive decline. Many different cell types in the brain become dysfunctional in disease. Single-cell sequencing studies from our lab and many other labs across the world have been performed on large...
Markus Delling, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: On Campus
Inherited defects in Polycystin signalling cause ADPKD, a common inherited cause of kidney failure. How Polycystins function is a topic of intense investigation, in part because developing more effective therapies for ADPKD will require mechanistic understanding of how Polycystins inhibit cystogenesis, the main cause of kidney failure. Polycystins PC1 and...
Joline Fan - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
Our research focuses on deciphering the network mechanisms underlying the rich relationship between sleep and epilepsy. As human sleep networks have been largely studied using surface EEG with low spatial resolution and PET/fMRI, we employ recording modalities with high spatial-temporal resolution of whole-brain functional activity, e.g. magnetoencephalography...
Trevor Fidler - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
We’re interested in identifying pathways which regulate macrophage function in atherosclerosis. In inflammatory sites like atheromas, macrophages accumulate, phagocytise necrotic cells, and uptake lipids leading to foam cell formation. Recent single-cell RNA sequencing has revealed that within these tissue macrophages can adopt multiple transcriptional states which can promote or...
Trevor Fidler - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
We’re interested in understanding why clonal hematopoiesis is associated with cardiovascular disease. Clonal hematopoiesis is a high prevalent disease in the elderly which occurs when hematopoietic stem cells acquire cancer mutations that promote cell survival. People with clonal hematopoiesis have a 40% increase in mortality. However, rather surprisingly this increase...
Aaron Fields - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: Off Campus
The Orthopaedic Biomechanics and Biotransport Laboratory at UCSF conducts research related to structure-function relationships in musculoskeletal tissues, with a particular focus on the mechanisms of nutrient transport in bone and cartilage and harnessing nutrient transport for tissue repair and regeneration. The lab combines engineering and biology approaches for (1...
Biological & Health SciencesAaron Fields - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: Off Campus
The Orthopaedic Biomechanics and Biotransport Laboratory at UCSF conducts research related to structure-function relationships in musculoskeletal tissues, with a particular focus on the mechanisms of nutrient transport in bone and cartilage and harnessing nutrient transport for tissue repair and regeneration. The lab combines engineering and biology approaches for (1...
Biological & Health SciencesPeng He - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
This project provides a hands-on introduction to benchmarking or advancing state-of-the-art computational tools used in single-cell and spatial transcriptomics analysis. With the rapid growth of available software and datasets, there is a pressing need to evaluate, compare, and optimize tools across a wide range of...
Engineering, Design & Technologies Biological & Health SciencesPeng He - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
The map of cells in our body is far from being complete. This project is a computational and conceptual exploration of human biology through the lens of integrated single-cell atlases. Students will collect and reanalyze published single-cell and single-nucleus RNA-seq datasets to discover rare or underappreciated...
Engineering, Design & Technologies Biological & Health SciencesPeng He - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
This project investigates how cells behave and interact in their native environments by analyzing spatial gene expression data. Interns will use Visium and Xenium spatial transcriptomics datasets to identify tissue microenvironments, reconstruct 3D spatial maps, and apply computational tools like NicheFormer, and contribute to research articles by generating publication-grade...
Engineering, Design & Technologies Biological & Health SciencesPeng He - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: On Campus
This project focuses on the discovery, optimization, and interpretation of gene signatures in massive single-cell and spatial transcriptomics datasets. Students will contribute to the development of scalable computational methods to extract meaningful biological patterns across thousands of samples and millions of cells. The research involves both algorithm development and...
Engineering, Design & Technologies Biological & Health SciencesJulian Hong - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
The Hong lab is part of the UCSF Department of Radiation Oncology and Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute. We focus on combining clinical domain knowledge with data science to generate insights from real world data, develop actionable computational tools, and evaluate the benefit of these advances for personalized cancer care...
Digital Humanities and Data Science Biological & Health SciencesGuo Huang - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours Location: On Campus
As shown in our recent publication (Hirose*, Payumo*, et al Science 2019), we aim to understand the divergent regenerative potential in ontogeny and phylogeny. For example, heart regeneration is remarkably robust in adult zebrafish and newborn mice while very limited in adult mammals. We use the heart as a model...
Biological & Health SciencesGuo Huang - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours Location: On Campus
We aim to study whether there are extreme physiological phenomena among identical twins that can not be explained by any known biological mechanism. We will exploit classical and non-classical model systems to explore this uncharted area. If you have identical twin brother/sister, your prior personal experiences would be...
Biological & Health SciencesGuo Huang - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours Location: On Campus
Current studies of mouse heart regeneration are largely limited to postmortem analysis of heart tissue to explore cellular activity and molecular mechanisms. We aim to combine a novel imaging window system designed and surgically implanted on the mouse chest by the Huang Lab at UCSF with the free-space angular...
Biological & Health SciencesGuo Huang - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours Location: Off Campus
There are emerging AI-trained models that integrate tremendous genomic, genetic and gene expression datasets to successfully predict complex gene networks and functional outcomes after in silico gene perturbation. Now we are exploring these models to understand organ physiology and pathology from developmental and evolutionary perspectives. ------------------------- Publications from previous URAP...
Biological & Health SciencesGalateia 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...
Biological & Health Sciences Engineering, Design & TechnologiesGalateia 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...
Biological & Health Sciences Engineering, Design & TechnologiesRenaud La Joie - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
Recent advances in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) therapeutics have given families and clinicians hope for slowing and eventually halting the effects of the disease, but existing disease-modifying therapies only target a single biochemical pathway, have limited clinical benefit, and are only able to be administered to a small proportion of...
Biological & Health SciencesRenaud La Joie - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive cognitive decline and accumulation of amyloid-β protein in the brain. Amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) enables visualization of amyloid deposition in vivo and can be used to determine the presence of amyloid plaques, supporting the diagnosis of AD. In...
Biological & Health SciencesRenaud La Joie - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) and exposure to repetitive head impacts (RHI) are common among military veterans and have been linked to an increased risk of cognitive impairment, psychiatric symptoms, and potentially neurodegenerative diseases later in life. Although not all individuals who are exposed to TBI or RHI experience long-term...
Biological & Health SciencesRenaud La Joie - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is characterized by the accumulation of abnormal proteins in the brain, including beta-amyloid (Aβ) pathology. Positron emission tomography (PET) imaging allows us to visualize and measure Aβ pathology in living people. The FDA approval of three Aβ-PET radiotracers has expanded the use of Aβ-PET...
Biological & Health SciencesJohn Liu - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common primary brain cancer. Despite decades of research to better treat this cancer, most patients unfortunately die within 2 years of diagnosis. Surgery followed by radiation therapy and chemotherapy comprise the standard of care for patients with GBM, but resistant to treatment poses a major...
Biological & Health SciencesDengke Ma - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours Location: On Campus
Life requires a constant supply of energy, yet animals can adapt by slowing down or temporarily shutting off costly processes. One key strategy is ribosomal hibernation, in which ribosomes—the cell’s protein-making machines—pause activity to conserve resources. In the nematode C. elegans, ribosomal hibernation is linked to sleep...
Biological & Health SciencesDengke Ma - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: Off Campus
The nematode C. elegans can be frozen alive, suspend life and revive later virtually any long after freezing, unlike many other multicellular organisms, including flies, fish, mice and humans. How C. elegans achieves this feat remains a fascinating unsolved mystery. This project will use our newly established reporters and assays...
Biological & Health SciencesMalu Mandelli - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
The Dyslexia Phenotyping Project involves a large-scale collaboration of UCSF investigators to understand the phenotype (the neural, genetic, cognitive, and behavioral expression) of dyslexia throughout the lifespan. Our aim is not only to identify language-specific weaknesses associated with dyslexia, but also the associated individual strengths. Participants complete a...
Biological & Health Sciences Education, Cognition & PsychologyMalu Mandelli - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: On Campus
The ALBA Language Neurobiology Laboratory within the UCSF Memory and Aging Center is directed by Dr. Maria Luisa Gorno-Tempini and collaborates with the Biomagnetic Imaging Laboratory, directed by Dr. Srikantan Nagarajan. This group’s research focuses on Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA), a neurodegenerative syndrome in which communication abilities become progressively...
Biological & Health Sciences Education, Cognition & PsychologyWilliam Martinez - Professor , UC San Francisco
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: Off Campus
The present study is an ongoing evaluation of the efficacy and effectiveness of a school-based group early intervention program (Fuerte) within the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). Fuerte targets newcomer immigrant youth (five years or less post arrival in the U.S.) who are at risk of experiencing immigration...
Education, Cognition & Psychology Social SciencesMarisa Medina - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
There are a limited number of human omics datasets that include menopausal status information for female subjects and include enough premenopausal and postmenopausal women. For instance, multi-omics data has been generated for thousands of All of Us Research Program participants. We will compare transcriptomic and proteomic profiles of premenopausal...
Biological & Health Sciences Digital Humanities and Data ScienceMarisa Medina - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
Not all women reach menopause at the same time. Some of this inter-individual variation is due to underlying genetic differences between women. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been conducted to identify a list of common genetic variants that are associated with age at natural menopause. We would like...
Biological & Health Sciences Digital Humanities and Data ScienceMarisa Medina - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
Electronic health record (EHR)-linked biobanks, such as the All of Us Research Program, do not contain reliable information about the timing of menopause for most women. Recent studies suggest that physiological changes associated with menopause can be detected through longitudinal patterns in routinely measured clinical biomarkers (e.g., in metabolic...
Biological & Health Sciences Digital Humanities and Data ScienceMarisa Medina - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
Electronic health record (EHR)-linked biobanks, such as the All of Us Research Program, do not contain reliable information about the timing of menopause for most women. However, clinical notes can give additional clues about the timing of this important milestone in women's lives. The All of Us Research Program...
Biological & Health Sciences Digital Humanities and Data ScienceJulian Motzkin - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
When pain becomes chronic, there can be changes in brain areas involved with processing pain signals. Our research combines fMRI of pain circuits with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), a type of non-invasive brain stimulation, to determine how rTMS may alleviate difficult-to-treat pain...
Biological & Health SciencesJulian Motzkin - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: Off Campus
The thermal grill illusion (TGI) is an illusion of burning pain created by interlaced innocuous warm and cool temperatures. Our lab is beginning to study this illusion as a measure of pain sensitivity in pain free adults, patients which chronic pain, and patients with mental health conditions like depression and...
Biological & Health SciencesEva Raphael - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: On Campus
Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are among the most common bacterial infections worldwide, particularly among urban-dwelling women. UTIs are primarily caused by Escherichia coli (E. coli). UTIs may cause a range of complications from mild discomfort to severe kidney infections. As antibiotic resistance increases, treatment strategies for UTIs become ineffective...
Biological & Health SciencesCarolyn Sangokoya - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: Off Campus
Our laboratory is engineering mammalian cells of all types for use in CRISPR screens, with the goal of identifying new pathways and therapeutic avenues for cellular iron regulation. Using functional genomics and systematically perturbing regions of the genome allows us to understand the role of iron in mammalian cells, organoids...
Hilde Schjerven - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
The Schjerven Lab at UCSF studies the transcription factor Ikaros (encoded by the Ikzf1 gene) and its different biological roles in immune cell development and disease. In a recent collaborative work, we found that the transcription factor Ikaros is expressed in medullary thymic epithelial cells (mTEC), and important for the...
Biological & Health SciencesHilde Schjerven - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
The Schjerven Lab at UCSF studies the transcription factor Ikaros (encoded by the Ikzf1 gene) and its different biological roles in immune cell development and disease. We have found that the transcription factor Ikaros is important in development of eosinophils, a type of white blood cell that is part of...
Biological & Health SciencesHilde Schjerven - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: to be negotiated Location: Off Campus
The Schjerven Lab at UCSF studies the transcription factor Ikaros (encoded by the Ikzf1 gene) and its different biological roles in immune cell development and disease. Ikaros is an important tumor suppressor in B-cell lineage acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and we have multiple projects in our lab to study how...
Biological & Health SciencesYoungho Seo - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: Off Campus
Keywords: cancer, radiopharmaceutical therapy, targeted alpha therapy, alpha particles, image processing, dosimetry, machine learning, digital autoradiography Radiopharmaceutical therapy with alpha-particle emitters (⍺RPT) is an emerging cancer treatment method that has demonstrated high efficacy in clinical trials for several types of cancer. Improvement of these drugs requires thorough pre-clinical...
Biological & Health Sciences Engineering, Design & TechnologiesYoungho Seo - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: Off Campus
Molecular imaging using ionizing radiation (i.e., gamma- and x-rays) is a powerful method of interrogating biochemical properties of imaging subjects. Particularly in research, we use small animal positron emission tomography (PET) and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), which are combined with x-ray computed tomography (CT). More commonly...
Biological & Health Sciences Engineering, Design & TechnologiesYoungho Seo - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: Off Campus
Radiotherapy with alpha-emitting nuclides is an extremely promising technique in cancer therapy. The very short range of alpha particles compared to beta particles allows to deliver a much higher therapeutical dose to the lesion, sparing healthy tissue. A fundamental problem with this technique is the inability of current radiation...
Biological & Health Sciences Engineering, Design & TechnologiesYoungho Seo - Professor, UC San Francisco
Status: Full- no new appr needed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: Off Campus
Keywords: image processing, image analysis, segmentation, medical imaging, PET, MRI, cardiac efficiency Myocardial injury causes how the heart muscle consumes energy and converts it to the work required for heart function. This damage could be either localized or global; however, to gain this knowledge, we should compute the local myocardial...
Biological & Health Sciences Engineering, Design & Technologies