URAP

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

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

LitBank an annotated dataset of fiction to support tasks in natural language processing and the computational humanities. While it currently exists for English, we'll be branching out to create similar resources for other languages as well (including Spanish, Japanese, German and other languages). The primary research will involve carrying out...

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

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

In machine learning, manual data annotation is often required for training or evaluation. While there are a number of annotation tools available, most are focused on specific tasks or annotation formats, and often do not work well with multiple modalities (e.g., text and video). In this project, you will contribute...

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

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

Methods in computer vision have reached a level of maturity that we can now develop computational instruments to measure a wide range of phenomena in film -- which actors are present in frame, the poses they have with respect to each other, the boundaries between shots -- which opens the door to...

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

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

This URAP position is a placeholder for mentorship of a project of your design. If you are an advanced student in CS, data science, or another discipline with a strong computational background and have a topic of interest in the space of cultural analytics or computational social science, feel free...

Weihong Bao - Professor, Film & Media

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

This project research the history of modern Chinese media, broadly construed, that crosses over photography, film and theater, architecture, and television. I locate the history in late to mid twentieth century China, with transcontinental traffic across the Pacific and the Atlantic. The project engages intellectual, technological, and aesthetic history and...

Patricia Baquedano-Lopez - Professor, Education

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

Background: In 2016, voters in the state of California passed Assembly Bill (AB) 2016 which now requires an ethnic studies curriculum for grades 7-12. In a state where the Latinx student population is 3,284,788 or 56.1% of all students in the state, the new ethnic studies requirement invites a deeper...

Patricia Baquedano-Lopez - Professor, Education

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

Background: Mam is one of the Mayan languages whose ancestral community spans southern Mexico and western Guatemala. According to the Censo Nacional de Poblacion y VII de Vivienda (2018), there are 842, 252 Mam speakers living in Guatemala, with the largest communities in Huehuetenango, San Marcos, and Quetzaltenango. This project...

Patricia Baquedano-Lopez - Professor, Education

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project aims to understand the impact of current immigration policies on undocumented students' pursuit of higher education. Its goals are twofold: (1) to identify which immigration policies in the United States support higher education for undocumented students, and (2) to determine whether Higher Education Serving Institutions (HSIs) and Emerging...

Sara Beckman - Senior Lecturer, Business, Haas School

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

Solutions to today’s increasingly “wicked problems” demand teaming across disciplinary boundaries. Teaming in organizations is the “engine of organizational learning…a way of working that brings people together to generate new ideas, find answers and solve problems. But people have to learn to team; it doesn’t come naturally.” (Amy Edmondson...

Sara Beckman - Senior Lecturer, Business, Haas School

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

Solutions to today’s increasingly “wicked problems” demand teaming across disciplinary boundaries. Teaming in organizations is the “engine of organizational learning…a way of working that brings people together to generate new ideas, find answers and solve problems. But people have to learn to team; it doesn’t come naturally.” (Amy Edmondson...

Sara Beckman - Senior Lecturer, Business, Haas School

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

Solutions to today’s increasingly “wicked problems” demand teaming across disciplinary boundaries. Teaming in organizations is the “engine of organizational learning…a way of working that brings people together to generate new ideas, find answers and solve problems. But people have to learn to team; it doesn’t come naturally.” (Amy Edmondson...

Sara Beckman - Senior Lecturer, Business, Haas School

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Solutions to today’s increasingly “wicked problems” demand teaming across disciplinary boundaries. Teaming in organizations is the “engine of organizational learning…a way of working that brings people together to generate new ideas, find answers and solve problems. But people have to learn to team; it doesn’t come naturally.” (Amy Edmondson...

Annaliese Beery - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Research in our laboratory is focused on factors that influence affiliative social behavior in two species of voles. This project involves working with a graduate student training voles to press a lever to gain access to social rewards, and testing how social reward varies under different circumstances...

Annaliese Beery - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

We maintain breeding colonies of meadow voles and prairie voles for social behavior research. This project builds on basic husbandry (covered by staff) to track lineages, wean new litters and determine pup sexes to maintain the long term health and robustness of our breeding program and provide voles for research...

Gasper Begus - Professor, Linguistics

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

This project looks at language in deep neural networks, animals (whales, elephants, spiders), and humans. We model spoken language from raw audio using deep generative neural networks (GANs). We use audio, neural, and behavioral data in spoken language to better understand and interpret deep learning models...

Matteo Benetton - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

In this project we plan to study the effect of financial influencers on asset markets. We will identify influencers in popular general platforms (e.g., twitter, instagram) and platform more specific for investments (e.g., StockTwits). We plan to study for both stocks and cryptocurrencies trading activities and return performances of retail...

Matteo Benetton - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

The project is part of a large agenda trying to understand how banks compete in an evolving environment affected by changing demographics and the entry non fintech lenders and bigtech firms. One project is studying the heterogeneous preferences of borrowers and savers to explain the lengthening of the financial intermediation...

Adam Benkato - Professor , Near Eastern Studies

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

This project consists of two parts: the 'Open Archive of Middle Persian Documents' and 'Chorasmian Online'. The goal is to make primary source material and lexicographical material available to researchers online. We will probably work on both projects in tandem or on alternating weeks, as the tasks and skills required...

Jill Berrick - Professor, Social Welfare

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: Off Campus

I am engaged in research that examines state policies regarding the imposition of child support payments for parents whose children are in foster care. An obscure federal policy allows states to charge parents when their children are placed in foster care. My work focuses on examining these policies across states...

Jill Berrick - Professor, Social Welfare

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: Off Campus

The U.S. is the only country in the world that has not signed the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. The position of children in this country is therefore ambiguous and contested. Examining news stories that pertain to children and families over the past five years, this study...

Jill Berrick - Professor, Social Welfare

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

Transgender children are disproportionately overrepresented in the United States child welfare system and experience many unique challenges during their child welfare experiences. The state of California began collecting data on transgender children in the child welfare system in 2019, but before this data can be analyzed, social workers' use of...

Jill Berrick - Professor, Social Welfare

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

In California, child protective services (CPS) investigators are required by law to evaluate reports of maltreatment in screened-in calls from the hotline and remove children from caregivers (and/or parents) who demonstrate evidence or significant risk of harm towards the child. In certain cases, caregivers may appeal on a...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

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

Rapid Reviews\Infectious Diseases (RR\ID) [rrid.mitpress.mit.edu], is an initiative of the MIT Press and the University of California, Berkeley. It is an open access, rapid-review overlay journal for the accelerated curation and peer review of COVID-19 and emerging infections disease-related research. RR\ID takes a transdisciplinary...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

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

Rapid Reviews\Infectious Diseases (RR\ID) [rrid.mitpress.mit.edu], is an initiative of the MIT Press and the University of California, Berkeley. It is an open access, rapid-review overlay journal for the accelerated curation and peer review of COVID-19 and emerging infections disease-related research. RR\ID takes a transdisciplinary...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

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

Psychiatric disorders including PTSD; and alcohol use disorder and other addictions are responsible for a large portion of both the global burden and US burden of disease. Current therapies help some people suffering from these disorders. Nevertheless, many patients do not respond adequately or cannot tolerate the side-effects accompanying...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

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

Mexico’s public healthcare system has faced underfunding, leading to saturation of primary services and reducing the quality and accessibility for the population. Moreover, there is still a large population that remains uninsured. As a response, people have sought private services to cover their demands. In the last 20 years, Pharmacy...

Stephen Best - Professor, Townsend Center

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

The Undergraduate Humanities Writer covers humanities-related events and programs at Berkeley's Townsend Center for the Humanities and across campus...

David Bilder - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Malignant tumors are distinct from benign growths in their ability to hijack and disrupt various processes in the body. Some common examples that most people are familiar with are tumor invasion of adjacent tissues, recruitment vasculature to accelerate growth, and dissemination of metastasizing cells. However, a less well-appreciated fact...

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...

Sonia Bishop - Professor, Psychology

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

General to all projects listed: Computational models have been a powerful tool for studying decision-making in both psychology and neuroscience. They have recently become popular in psychiatry as well. Part of the appeal has been that computational approaches delineate individual differences in decision-making that can explain why people...

Sonia Bishop - Professor, Psychology

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

Computational models have been a powerful tool for studying decision-making in both psychology and neuroscience. They have recently become popular in psychiatry as well. Part of the appeal has been that computational approaches delineate individual differences in decision-making that can explain why people with different psychiatric disorders (such...

Sonia Bishop - Professor, Psychology

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

General to all projects: Computational models have been a powerful tool for studying decision-making in both psychology and neuroscience. They have recently become popular in psychiatry as well. Part of the appeal has been that computational approaches delineate individual differences in decision-making that can explain why people with...

Sonia Bishop - Professor, Psychology

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

In this project, we are using multi-feature encoding models to analyse functional magnetic resonance imaging data collected when participants look at naturalistic examples of emotional faces. The goal is to better understand how tuning to facial information (expression, gender, age etc) varies across the cortical surface of the human...

Benjamin Blackman - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

In order to test the function of specific genes or the impact of genetic variants on phenotype, genetic manipulation is required. The aim of the project is to assist with development and implementation of methods for genetic transformation of sunflower and monkeyflower, the two main study systems in the lab...

Benjamin Blackman - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

A major focus of our lab is identifying how genetic and phenotypic variation that has evolved among plant populations adapts plants to their local climates. Understanding how these adaptations to climate variation across space have evolved will help us understand mechanisms by which plants can evolve to cope with a...

Benjamin Blackman - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

Flowering and reproduction are highly regulated processes in composite plants like sunflower which produce disks that are clusters of many individual flowers. Environmental cues like light and temperature interact with the circadian clock regulate what time of the season buds first start to develop, and the same integration of internal...

Benjamin Blackman - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

During floral development, patterns of pigment are painted on to the petals of many plants, and these pigments often serve to attract and direct bee pollinators toward pollen and nectar rewards. We have found several natural variants affecting the nectar guide pigmentation patterns of the common monkeyflower in both the...

Anne Bloom - Executive Director, Law

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

The Civil Justice Research Initiative (CJRI) is a think tank that explores, through interdisciplinary, academically-based and independent research, how the civil justice system can be made more available to everyone seeking relief. The CJRI is chaired by Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and directed by Anne Bloom, an attorney...

Carl Boettiger - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Become familiar with the mathematical, statistical, and computational tools used in the group and learn how to apply these methods to answer questions in ecological research and conservation decision making. Emphasis on the use of deep reinforcement learning and best practices in data science software development...

Carl Boettiger - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Develop, test, and visualize methods for forecasting ecological variables such as carbon flux, beetle abundance, or indicators of aquatic ecosystem health...

Matilde Bombardini - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: Off Campus

Abstract Campaign finance laws aim to limit an individual's influence over the political process. We show that corporate ownership may be an important mechanism by which institutional investors circumvent such constraints and amplify their influence. Using data on the political giving and ownership of all 13-F investors...

Matilde Bombardini - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

he Buy American Act places strict limitations on the purchase of foreign manufacturing products by the U.S. Federal Government. Despite the increasingly U.S.-centered nature of many government programs, like the recent Inflation Reduction Act, we lack a detailed understanding of the costs and benefits of this type of policy...

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...

Mike Boots - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Our research group in the Department of Integrative Biology researches the dynamics of infectious disease evolution and population biology in multiple insect systems, including Lepidopteran hosts (moths and butterflies). We are currently working on two interconnected projects: The first project investigates host heterogeneity by examining how environmental factors (such as...

Mike Boots - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Our research group in the Department of Integrative Biology researches the dynamics and evolution of infectious disease. Pairwise host–parasite relationships are typically embedded in broader networks of ecological interactions, which have the potential to shape parasite evolutionary trajectories. Understanding this ‘community context’ of pathogen evolution is vital for wildlife...

Mike Boots - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

The Boots' lab in the Department of Integrative Biology studies disease ecology and evolution across multiple systems, with research ranging from theory to empirical to field biology. This project focuses on the honey bee – native bee – virus field system. Each year managed honey bees in the USA face high overwintering...

Mike Boots - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Our research group in the Department of Integrative Biology studies the dynamics, ecology, and evolution of infectious diseases through various systems. Almonds are majorly grown in California and require mass imports of honeybees for their pollination. However, honeybees used for mass agriculture also suffer from constant exposure to pathogens. RNA...

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...