URAP

Yang Dan - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Sleep problems are a common symptom of Parkinson’s disease (PD) and in some cases an early warning sign before movement deficits. Sleep problems in PD are diverse and can be made worse by medications that treat other PD symptoms by affecting dopamine or norepinephrine levels in the brain. While dopamine...

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...

William Dow, 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...

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...

Bethanie Edwards - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

Help develop an improved lipidomic workflow that is optimized for marine compounds, specifically those found in suspended and dissolved organic matter throughout the world’s oceans (0-4000 m deep). Marine lipidomics allows oceanographers to analyze thousands of lipid compounds in a single mass spectrometry run. Lipids serve a multitude of roles...

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...

Lia Fernald - Professor, Public Health

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

Around one third of young children in Latin America co-reside with a grandparent. Unlike other regions, intergenerational cohabitation has remained common even with increasing economic prosperity. Grandparents may provide additional care for children with time or financial resources, yet they may also be a burden on parents if the...

Lia Fernald - Professor, Public Health

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

Over 250 million children under five years in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have been estimated to be at risk of poor development, accounting for 43% of young children living in those countries (Lu et al., 2016). There are many reasons that children are at risk for poor development...

Lia Fernald - Professor, Public Health

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

Numerous studies have shown that early childhood development (ECD) interventions, including psychosocial stimulation, are effective in promoting disadvantaged children’s short-term cognitive and socioemotional outcomes, as well as their long-term educational attainment, earnings, and health. One proposed strategy for “scaling up” these interventions to achieve greater coverage in LMICs...

Lia Fernald - Professor, Public Health

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

Background: Every seven minutes a woman is a victim of domestic violence in Brazil. Research on intimate partner violence shows that victimization is not an isolated incident. Because of the repetition of abuse, it’s possible that some women seek assistance from multiple sectors over the course of their victimization. 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...

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: Current Term Now Closed     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: Current Term Now Closed     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: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

AI technology and AI tools will change the healthcare landscape. The purpose of this project is two-fold. First, the project aims to understand AI technology's impact on the broader economy coupled with a focus on healthcare, including diagnostics, treatments, drug development and workflow processes. Second, the project...

Brent Fulton - Associate Director, Public Health

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

Healthcare providers and insurers have consolidated in the past decade, leading to higher prices without a commensurate increase in quality. The study will extend the evidence base on the effects of healthcare consolidation, including understanding the impacts of hospital-to-hospital affiliations and the impacts of private equity firms acquiring...

Brent Fulton - Associate Director, Public Health

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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...

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: Current Term Now Closed     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...

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...

Scott Geller - Research Scientist, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

We are a campus research unit located in Barker Hall at the Northwest corner of the UC Berkeley campus. We support primarily on-campus molecular scientists and related professionals (graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, staff, etc) with their DNA sequencing and analysis needs. As DNA sequencing technologies continually advance, so...

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

No matter the size, all organisms interact with the world via their senses. Sensory input dictates reactions to stimuli, and the ability of organisms to adapt their neurological and sensory structures is critical to success and survival. Web building spiders in particular use webs as an extension and enhancement of...

Rosemary Gillespie - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Hawaii is well known for its unique biodiversity – rather like the Galapagos, but much more extreme. This is particularly true of insects and spiders, where almost all the native species are unique to the islands. However, the environments of Hawaii are suffering at the hand of invasive species and climate...

Rosemary Gillespie - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

This project focuses on the biodiversity of insects and spiders on Pacific islands. Biodiversity surveys often accumulate a ton of specimens, but it is usually hard to figure out what the species actually are. Many species cannot be identified because they are immature, or are not yet described. In this...

J. Keith Gilless - Professor, University and Jepson Herbaria

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

Herbaria are museums that house preserved plant collections for scientific purposes. For centuries, plant specimens have been collected from various locations, labeled with essential data, and stored for use by scientists and researchers worldwide. Properly curated plant specimens can last indefinitely, providing data for generations of scholars to study taxonomy...

J. Keith Gilless - Professor, University and Jepson Herbaria

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

The spirit collection in the University and Jepson Herbaria houses thousands of plant and algae specimens preserved in alcohol. This preservation method is essential for material that cannot be dried or pressed, as it retains their three-dimensional structure and allows for detailed examination without the distortion or shrinkage that...

Xiaohua Gong - Professor, Optometry

Status: Full- no new appr needed     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...

David Gonzalez - Professor, Public Health

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

For the past decade, the United States (U.S.) has been the leading global producer of oil and gas, and an estimated 17 U.S. million residents live within 1 km of active oil and gas wells. Drilling and operating wells results in air pollution, water pollution, noise, and other stressors. Recently...

David Gonzalez - Professor, Public Health

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

In recent years, there has been a growing focus on examining the associations between historical racist policies and present-day health disparities. For example, a growing body of evidence documents that environmental hazards (such as oil wells and urban heat islands) are more likely to be located in neighborhoods that...

Karsten Gronert - Professor, Optometry

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

My research team is part of a handful of laboratories around the world that is focused on elucidating the role and molecular mechanisms of protective lipid mediator programs that are essential for regulating and orchestrating routine and healthy immune responses and neuroprotection. Research in our lab uses in vitro and...

Karsten Gronert - Professor, Optometry

Status: Full- no new appr needed     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: Current Term Now Closed     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: Full- no new appr needed     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...