URAP

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     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Why do some plants thrive while others face extinction? While the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) tracks species risk, they often overlook a critical factor: genetic diversity. Genetic diversity is the "fuel" for adaptation; without it, plants cannot evolve to survive climate change or new diseases. Our...

Moisés Expósito-Alonso - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

International conservation policies including the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework now consider genetic diversity of wild species in their targets. However, scalable, theory-driven tools to assess and predict genetic diversity loss are still emerging, limiting their use in conservation planning. Analogous to the species-area relationship, recent work has...

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...

Aaron 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...

Seth Finnegan - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

The formation of the Isthmus of Panama separated the Caribbean Sea from the Pacific Ocean, and the marine ecosystems on either side of the isthmus have diverged substantially over the last several million years as a result of this split. Compared to the strong coastal upwelling zones present in the...

Seth Finnegan - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     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...

Suzanne Fleiszig - Professor, Optometry

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

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is the most common cause of contact lens-mediated microbial keratitis. Our lab uses in-vitro and in-vivo models to study the adaptation of Pseudomonas aeruginosa to the intracellular environment. Our recently published paper shows that intracellular bacteria persist in vacuoles, where they resist high-dose antibiotic...

Suzanne Fleiszig - Professor, Optometry

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

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is found to be the main causative agent of infection of human corneal and bronchial epithelial cells in bacterial keratitis and bacterial pneumonia respectively. To understand the etiology of chronic bacterial infection we look to determine the steps associated with intracellular biofilm formation by Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We aim...

Suzanne Fleiszig - Professor, Optometry

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

Our lab has shown that P. aeruginosa can interact with and invade epithelial cells to establish an intracellular niche. We have recently found that intracellular bacteria occupy a subcellular compartment where they resist high dose antibiotic treatment. We are interested in understanding the factors associated with bacterial persistence and enhanced...

Suzanne Fleiszig - Professor, Optometry

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

The cornea is endowed with a high density of sensory nerve endings, including some polymodal by virtue of their Transient Receptor Potential (TRP) cation channels. Recently, the Fleiszig lab reported that corneal nerves can modulate the healthy cornea’s susceptibility to bacterial adhesion involving TRPV1 and TRPA1. Our new data show...

Brent Fulton - Associate Director, Public Health

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

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used in teaching to personalize instruction, provide rapid formative feedback, support tutoring and practice through adaptive systems, and help instructors modify or extend existing course materials more efficiently than traditional lecture re-recording allows. AI tools can generate examples, quizzes, simulations, and alternative explanations tailored...

Brent Fulton - Associate Director, Public Health

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

The Nicholas C. Petris Center on Health Care Markets and Consumer Welfare is a health economics research center that conducts empirical research to inform health policy. Our research examines how healthcare markets, financing, and regulation affect the cost, quality, and accessibility of care. Current and past projects address healthcare market...

Brent Fulton - Associate Director, Public Health

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

In the United States, government spending on programs (excluding health programs) targeting low-income populations total about $450 billion per year, whereas personal savings in the U.S. totals about $1 trillion per year. Hence, the potential for private investment to improve equity is significant, but would be the rate of...

Brent Fulton - Associate Director, Public Health

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

Part 1: The U.S. medical education system is not value-based, but instead relies on a one-size-fits-all approach with one of the longest education and training durations among developed countries. The length of time required to become a physician increases healthcare costs and limits access to care...

Hernan Garcia - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Ultimately, in the developing embryo, cells make decisions individually based on local context. Individual cells don’t have access to the morphogen concentrations across the entire embryo. They can only be affected by the concentration of proteins in neighboring nuclei, and their individual response to signaling is crucial for developmental decision...

Hernan Garcia - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Gene expression is noisy. How much of this noise is due to variations in the environment of a gene locus, and how much is due to intrinsic limitations of the transcriptional machinery? This project aims to explore these questions by measuring the transcriptional dynamics of two identical, spatially coupled reporter...

Hernan Garcia - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

A stochastic oscillator undergoes rhythmic motion but is governed by random fluctuations. One such example from the natural world is an oscillatory gene regulatory network known as the segmentation clock, which coordinates the formation of somites in vertebrates. Recent advances in our lab have allowed us to measure real-time...

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: Full- no new appr needed     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...

Scott Geller - Research Scientist, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Located in Barker Hall, our core scientific support unit provides critical DNA sequencing and analysis support to the UC Berkeley molecular biology community. In addition to daily Sanger and Nanopore sequencing, we provide specialized services such as plasmid preparation, PCR clean-up, and human cell line authentication. To expand our...

Rosemary Gillespie - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

This project asks, "What defines the "health" of an ecological community, and can the signatures of "health be detected from communities of insects and spiders? And to what extent is that signature captured across scales, from plants, on to imagery – drones, helicopters, and satellites? The work aims to show how...

Rosemary Gillespie - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

This project addresses dynamics of plant microbial communities under disease pressure through the study of Rapid ʻŌhiʻa Death (ROD) in Hawaiʻi. ROD is caused by two fungal pathogens, Ceratocystis lukuohia and C huliohia, which co- occur on Hawaiʻi Island. Fieldwork was conducted across an altitudinal gradient (from 100 to 1,800...

Rosemary Gillespie - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

This project seeks to further develop and apply a new method of collecting environmental DNA (eDNA) from forest ecosystems through the collection of rain water from tree canopy throughfall. This data will be used to make inferences about ecosystem health and the forest community’s resilience to species invasion by building...

Rosemary Gillespie - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Every biodiversity analysis starts with a species survey. However, biodiversity surveys often yield large numbers of specimens difficult to identify because the samples collected are too small, immature, or belong to species that have not yet been formally described. In this project, we focus on identifying species, especially spiders, herbivorous...

J. Keith Gilless - Professor, University and Jepson Herbaria

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

This project offers a unique opportunity to gain hands-on experience working in a herbarium. Each apprentice will participate in two distinct tracks: digitizing a series of historical plant collections from China and assisting with the setup of a new laboratory space...

Anu Manchikanti Gomez - Professor, Social Welfare

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

Profound racialized inequities in maternal and infant mortality, preterm birth, and maternal morbidity disproportionately affect Black pregnant people and their infants in the U.S. Economic insecurity during pregnancy is a critical social determinant of maternal and infant health. Lower income during pregnancy is associated with higher and more sustained levels...

Xiaohua Gong - Professor, Optometry

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

The research in the lab has been directed to study molecular and cellular mechanisms that regulate the development of the eye and the lens and to investigate the underlying mechanisms of different eye diseases including cataract and retinal degeneration by using techniques from the fields of molecular and cellular biology...

Xiaohua Gong - Professor, Optometry

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

This project will mainly focus on RNA sequencing and differential expression analysis for comparing genetically mutated mice with wild-type mice. It aims to find target genes involved in cataract formation, retinal degeneration and lens growth...

Karsten Gronert - Professor, Optometry

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

Our lab is looking for a motivated, organized undergraduate student to help manage our daily operations and assist with mouse research projects. This is a fantastic opportunity to get hands-on experience in a biomedical research environment...

Karsten Gronert - Professor, Optometry

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

Assist in the preparation of biological samples, carry out solid phase extractions for isolation of bioactive lipids. Learn, assist and eventually run an HPLC-mass spectrometry system. The position requires a high degree of motivation and organizational skill as well as the ability to operate complex and state-of-the...

Karsten Gronert - Professor, Optometry

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

We are focused on elucidating the role and molecular mechanisms of neuroprotective lipid mediators essential for inhibiting the death of retinal ganglion cells in glaucoma. We use wide range of techniques in lab including single-cell transcriptomics, morphOMICs, and lipidomics as a tool to investigate and understand the protective mechanisms...

Yangnan Gu - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

Plant's responses to external stimuli are highly dependent on the shuttling of intracellular signals to the nucleus, where the genome is reprogrammed to drive transcriptome changes to combat stress. A fundamentally important aspect of this process is the nuclear transport of stress-related signaling cargos mediated by nuclear transport receptors...

Yangnan Gu - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

The nuclear envelope (NE) is structurally and functionally vital for eukaryotic cells, yet its protein constituents and their functions are poorly understood in plants. We combined subtractive proteomics and the proximity labeling technology-coupled with quantitative mass spectrometry to understand the landscape of NE membrane proteins in Arabidopsis and identified...

Richard Harland - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

The focus of the lab is to understand development; that is, the molecular mechanisms that orchestrate how a single cell (the egg) transforms into an adult animal with a multitude of functioning organs, following a specific body plan. The first milestone in the establishment of the body plan is to...

Richard Harland - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Sleep has been shown to be crucial to animal life. Moreover, sleep deprivation during the development of the fetus leads to emotional and cognitive effects in the offspring later in life. Unfortunately, the mechanism behind these behaviors are not defined due to the technical and ethical impediments related to human...

Richard Harland - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

We will isolate DNAs encoding cytoskeletal regulators, describe their expression, and knock-out or add back functions to determine whether they are active in controlling cell behaviors. Background. Amphibian embryos have been valuable models to examine the behaviors of cells that contribute to the shape changes of the embryo. The...

Richard Harland - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Though sleep is pervasive across animals, the core function of this deeply conserved behavior remains unknown. Sleep has been hypothesized to serve many roles, from the replenishing of molecules consumed during periods of activity, to the facilitation of learning and the formation of long term memories. Recently, colleagues and I...

Eva Harris - Professor, Public Health; Div of Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

With 3.6 billion people living at risk of infection, and approximately 400 million infections and 96 million cases per year, dengue is the most prevalent mosquito-borne viral illness. The disease spectrum includes dengue fever, characterized by debilitating symptoms such as high fever and myalgia; and dengue hemorrhagic fever/dengue...

Eva Harris - Professor, Public Health; Div of Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

The four dengue virus serotypes (DENV1-4) cause the most important mosquito-borne viral disease of humans, with 100 million cases annually. The mechanisms by which the human immune response to DENV provides either protection against or enhancement of a subsequent infection with a different DENV serotype are not fully understood...

Eva Harris - Professor, Public Health; Div of Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Previous studies in the Harris laboratory have demonstrated the ability of the secreted flaviviral protein, nonstructural protein 1 (NS1), to induce both hyperpermeability in vitro and vascular leak in vivo, both mediated by the disruption of endothelial glycocalyx components and intercellular junction degradation. Further work in the lab aims at...

Eva Harris - Professor, Public Health; Div of Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Dengue (DENV) and Zika (ZIKV) flaviruses are mosquito-borne viruses that are major medical and public health problems worldwide. DENV causes the most prevalent mosquito-borne viral disease of humans, and severe cases manifesting vascular leakage can be fatal. Nonstructural protein 1 (NS1) is a flaviviral protein that participates in...

John Harte - Professor, Energy and Resources

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

Students will work with Prof. Harte to formulate and explore mathematical models describing ecosystems that are far from steady state as a consequence of human and/or natural disturbance. Testing of model predictions with available data sets will also be carried...

John Harte - Professor, Energy and Resources

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

Vegetation and microclimate data collected from Sierran red fir forest will be used to assess the role of environmental parameters (e.g., temperature, soil moisture) in successful establishment of conifer tree seedlings. The project will advance niche theory by examining spatially-explicit relationships between the environmental parameters and measures of seedling...

Lin He - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

The earliest step of mammalian development from a fertilized egg to a complex organism is the preimplantation development. During this stage, a fertilized zygote develops into a 100-cell blastocyst in 3.5 days in mice (or 5–6 days in humans). In this short window, the embryo undergoes remarkable changes...

Lin He - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Female reproductive capacity declines with age as the ovarian reserve—the finite pool of follicles containing oocytes—is gradually depleted. This decline begins earlier than many other age-related physiological changes and eventually culminates in menopause. In some women, premature loss of ovarian function results in primary ovarian insufficiency (POI...