URAP

Ursa Arktos - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

go bears...

Ursa Arktos - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Check back for status     

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Mike Boots - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Rauri Bowie - Professor, Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

We are working on a project to study the adaptation and evolutionary history of hummingbirds and sunbirds. Hummingbirds and sunbirds are two groups of birds that have independently adopted nectar as a major component of their diet and have evolved to be morphologically similar. Our project aims to explore whether...

Rauri Bowie - Professor, Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

My lab is involved with a large collaborative project to study disease transmission within and among species of wild birds. As part of this project, swabs of a variety of bird species are being collected to study their microbial communities (i.e. their microbiome). Lab studies suggest that microbial diversity can...

Rauri Bowie - Professor, Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

Students can assist with several ongoing research projects that investigate geographic variation and species limits in birds and integrate these data with quantification of prevalence of disease vectors such as bird malaria and trypanosome infections...

Rauri Bowie - Professor, Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

Nest structures are widespread across animals including insects, fish, amphibians, and most conspicuously, birds. Despite their ubiquity, nests remain one of the most understudied components of avian life history. Some of the most remarkable examples of elaborate nest design are within the passerine weaverbirds (family Ploceidae). Weaverbirds are an Old...

Todd Dawson - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

The Dawson Lab at UC Berkeley has been investigating California’s coastal redwoods for over 35 years. Past studies have focused on redwood ecophysiology, responses to climate and climate change, the Redwood’s relationship to coastal fog, reconstructing the coastal hydroclimate from tree rings and redwood-microbe interactions. The current projects are...

Robert Dudley - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Flying insects are the most diverse and abundant form of animal life in the terrestrial biosphere. However, the origins of insect flight remain obscure given the absence of a transitional fossil record. This project will involve construction of a small robot that mimics the likely morphology of early insects, and...

Robert Dudley - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Hummingbirds are only found in the Americas, but in Africa and Asia some members of a different bird family (the sunbirds, Nectariniidae) can also hover, albeit for relatively short durations. This behavior has never been systematically characterized, however, and this project will survey existing video sequences from on-line ornithological...

Moisés Expósito-Alonso - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

The global climate is changing at an unprecedented rate due to human activities, threatening global biodiversity and food security. A fundamental question in evolutionary biology is: What enables or limits species to rapidly evolve and adapt to changing climates? In this project, we will use natural ecotypes of Arabidopsis to...

Moisés Expósito-Alonso - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Description: Spontaneous mutations fuel the rate of evolutionary change by increasing the amount of genetic variation across the green tree of life. Genetic variation is utilized within natural populations to improve fitness, therefore, knowledge of the historical bias of mutation rates and spectra across a genome and across populations will...

Moisés Expósito-Alonso - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     

Quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) is the most widespread tree in North America, iconic for its gold color in the fall. The species provides essential ecosystem services, such as soil/water retention, habitat, and wood products. Aspen provides critical and unique ecosystem services, such as soil/water retention, habitat for other...

Seth Finnegan - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

For tens of millions of years large parts of California’s Central Valley were flooded by the ocean, creating an inland sea with a unique ecosystem including now-extinct species of clams, snails, sand dollars, corals, and other groups familiar from modern California beaches. Some of the species that lived in...

Seth Finnegan - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Besides coral, marine reefs are made up of many other strange invertebrates, including the little-known “moss animal”, or bryozoan. These abundant, microscopic filter-feeders grow in colonies and build elaborate domes, lacework, and tree-like structures on the ocean floor, from the intertidal to the abyss, from the poles...

Seth Finnegan - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Death assemblages’ are the actively accumulating shelly remains of organisms living at the bottom of the ocean. Because death assemblages accumulate over 100s to 1,000s of years, they are powerful tools to estimate past biodiversity. By comparing the ecological composition of living communities and death assemblages, we can assess recent...

Stephen Gaughran - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

The California coast is home to more than two dozen marine mammal species. Our state is also a highly productive agricultural center for the country, producing not just food but also agricultural runoff that flows into the ocean. This runoff carries nutrients and microbes from fertilizer and livestock waste, which...

Stephen Gaughran - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Monk seals are the world’s only tropical seals, with two distinct species living in Hawaii and the Mediterranean Sea. Despite intensive conservation efforts, only about 1,000 individuals survive in each species. My lab is using whole genome sequencing data from hundreds of individuals and population genetic analyses to study the...

Stephen Gaughran - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

The platypus is one of the only surviving species of monotremes, a clade of egg-laying mammals. These animals live in rivers and streams of eastern Australia and Tasmania, and show many unusual phenotypes including egg laying, electrolocation, venom production, and adaptations to aquatic life. The species is also of...

Britt Koskella - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Microbiomes change over time, often with important functional consequences for their hosts. But the ecological drivers of microbiome succession are poorly understood. We are studying the role that microbial interactions play in this process by examining the constituents of the digestive microbiome of the insectivorous California pitcher plant (Darlingtonia californica...

Britt Koskella - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Phage, viruses that infect and kill bacteria, are ubiquitous, yet their impacts on beneficial bacteria that colonize plants are not well understood. Phage are abundant in the soil and therefore soil-dwelling bacteria must hone defenses against phage in order to survive. Likewise, phage must hone their capacity to infect...

Britt Koskella - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

We are building a new system (fire blight of pear trees) to better understand how bacteriophage viruses might impact the ability of a bacterial pathogen (Erwinia amylovora) to colonize and infect pear trees. We are tracking bacteria-phage interactions through time by isolating individual phages from each of 25 diseased...

Britt Koskella - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

In natural systems, microorganisms interact with myriad other microbial populations which influence their evolution and ecology. When associated with a eukaryotic host, these complex microbial communities (known as microbiomes) also interact with and impact their host’s ecology and evolution, nutrient acquisition, and pathogen susceptibility. Despite the microbiome's vast importance on...

Juan Liu - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Lateral line sensory system, or lateral line organ, or simply the lateral line, is a system of sensory organs found in fish and some tetrapods (four-legged vertebrates). The lateral line enables those vertebrates to detect and perceive the hydrodynamic and physical environment they inhabit including movement, vibration, and pressure...

Juan Liu - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Scientific illustration is art in the service of science by drawing, painting, or rendering images of scientific subjects to accurately inform and communicate sciences. Research in fossil fishes (paleoichthyology) is at the junction of paleontology and ichthyology, and therefore, possesses characteristics of both —-- the incomplete nature of fossil preservations and...

Juan Liu - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Our study aims to explore the intricate details of mammalian hearing, with a specific emphasis on the function and evolution of the middle ear, with comparative anatomy with fish hearing apparatus. This critical aspect of auditory anatomy plays a pivotal role in the way mammals perceive and interpret sound. By...

Juan Liu - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Catfishes (Siluriformes) are remarkable among hearing specialist fishes in their possession of the Weberian apparatus, a conductive multi-ossicle chain linking the inner ear and swim bladder that is analogous to the middle ear ossicles of the mammalian tetrapods. Work with laboratory animals has produced considerable insight into the role...

Cynthia Looy - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Pollinators are essential components of a healthy ecosystem and provide vital benefits to both plants and animals. The student-run pollinator garden on the south side of the Valley Life Science Building (VLSB) supports native insects, spiders, and other wildlife and is an environmental education resource for students. Our goal...

Cynthia Looy - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Plants are adapted to the physical conditions in their environments, including temperature, precipitation, atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and light level. In cooler and drier habitats, leaves tend to be smaller with condensed venation and toothed margins. While under warmer and wetter conditions, leaves tend to be larger, have ‘drip tips’, and...

Michael Nachman - Professor, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, Integrative Biology

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

Within ~500 years, house mice (Mus musculus domesticus) have expanded into a wide variety of habitats across North and South America. House mice can be found from the tropics to the arctic, and populations inhabiting these different environments have adapted to different thermal regimes. This project will focus on the...

Michael Nachman - Professor, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, Integrative Biology

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

Within ~500 years, house mice (Mus musculus domesticus) have expanded into a wide variety of habitats across North and South America. House mice can be found from the tropics to the arctic, and populations inhabiting these different environments have adapted to different thermal regimes. Mice from cold regions are larger...

Michael Nachman - Professor, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, Integrative Biology

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

A fundamental challenge in evolutionary biology is to understand how new species arise. The California vole is a widespread Californian rodent that appears generally uniform and is currently classified as a single species. However, recent studies have shown that the California vole forms two genetically distinct groups with reproductive isolation...

Daniel Okamoto - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Climate change is dramatically altering the oceans. These changes include increases in sea surface temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, and primary productivity. We use experiments and field data to assess how these changes affect the physiology, growth, reproduction, and behavior of marine animals. We have numerous samples from past experiments and...

Daniel Okamoto - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Wild fish populations are often subject to high levels of mortality from industrialized human harvest. Harvest mortality, particularly under certain environmental contexts, may have indirect, unpredictable effects on populations' biology beyond simply the removal of individuals from a population. To study these effects, we are using an experimental model system...

Daniel Okamoto - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

This URAP opportunity focuses on the energetics of host-parasite interactions in a model zooplankton-fungal parasite system. Over the course of Fall 2025- Spring 2026, we will conduct several experiments that test how variable food resources shape host and parasite fitness. Students will have the opportunity to connect and...

Daniel Okamoto - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Location: On Campus

Seaweeds (e.g., kelp, nori) are important primary producers, food sources, and essential fish habitat around the globe. While many species are resilient to climate change, many important species are also exhibiting declines in recent years and especially in response to marine heatwaves. We are conducting laboratory experiments and fieldwork focused...

Victor Ortega Jimenez - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Marangoni effect is used by water striders (Veliidae) and rove beetles (Staphylinidae) to induce an ultrafast escape response against inter- or intra-specific predators. However, it is unclear if the surfactants secreted by these insects, that reduce surface tension of water, can also affect predator’s locomotion during the chasing...

Victor Ortega Jimenez - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Phantom crane flies (Bittacomorpha clavipes) are one of the most mysterious fliers in the insect world because it has been suggested that they are able to use their legs and body to generate aerodynamic forces and still keep a tight aerial control. Our research can be applied to micro aerial...

Victor Ortega Jimenez - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Helicopters seeds (Samaras) are remarkable for their aerodynamic capabilities with insects wings. We Investigate the aerodynamics and kinematics of samaras in a vertical wind tunnel. The goal of this project is to understand the unsteady mechanisms they have to fly on unsteady flow conditions...

Victor Ortega Jimenez - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Flying predator and their prey are commonly challenged to interact under unstable flow conditions. However, the effects produced by non-steady flows on predator-prey relationships, which demand acute aerial control and maneuvering, remain unclear. Particularly, because aerial predators are generally larger than preys, which can bias the locomotory effects...

Mary Power - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

The Angelo Coast Range Reserve is a UC Berkeley Natural Reserve System site in Mendocino County, on the South Fork of the Eel River. Angelo is the site of numerous historical and current UC Berkeley research studies, and collections by UC Berkeley Natural History museums. The proposed research project is...

Onja Razafindratsima - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Seed dispersal by frugivores depends on behavior such as fruit preference, movement, gut retention, and habitat use. Primates play a critical role as seed dispersers, but in degraded or fragmented landscapes, reduced food availability and restricted movement may limit their effectiveness. Black howler monkeys (Alouatta pigra), native to Southeast Mexico...

Onja Razafindratsima - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Forest regeneration and seed dispersal are essential ecological processes for maintaining biodiversity, ecosystem stability, and carbon sequestration. However, these processes are being threatened by agricultural expansion and defaunation. As a first step toward understanding the importance of animal seed dispersers in forest regeneration, this project aims to assess the diversity...

Onja Razafindratsima - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Our research group is interested in addressing various questions related to primate ecology. We have gathered data in the field for over two years about different aspects of movement and foraging ecology of three sympatric lemur species in the rainforests of Madagascar. Students will have the opportunity to develop specific...

Michal Shuldman - Assistant Teaching Professor, Integrative Biology

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

This project looks at how undergraduate biology students perceive their instructors' practices in introductory courses at a large research university. While most education reform efforts in biology focus on “inclusive teaching” have been defined by instructors and researchers, there hasn’t been much focus on how students themselves view inclusion. We’re...

Rebecca Tarvin - Professor , Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

Evolutionary transitions underlying phenotypic change are difficult to study because they often occur over millions of years. However, the fruit fly has a short generation time and a small genome that is well annotated and cheap to sequence. We used a large-scale experimental evolution approach to evolve toxin-sequestering...

Rebecca Tarvin - Professor , Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

The Tarvin Lab studies how and why poison frogs don’t poison themselves. We aim to measure the effect of toxin consumption on frog health and chemical defenses through toxin feeding experiments paired with phenotypic assays (health monitoring, jumping challenges) and genomic assessment (RNA and DNA sequencing...