URAP

Drew Jacoby-Senghor - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

Some topics under investigation: - Do perceptions of hiring criterion vary based on preference to maintain the status quo? - Exploring the pitfalls of the hiring process and attempts to increase diversity - Why do supervisors assign more diversity related tasks to racial minority and woman employees? What psychological cost does this have...

Sheri Johnson - Professor, Psychology

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

This project explores how specific dietary interventions—time-restricted eating and the Mediterranean diet—impact symptoms and quality of life in individuals with bipolar disorder. By examining the relationship between eating patterns and mood regulation, the study aims to identify potential lifestyle-based approaches to improve mental health outcomes...

Sheri Johnson - Professor, Psychology

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

The goal of this study is to consider cognitive influences on misophonia...

Sheri Johnson - Professor, Psychology

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

Emotional dysregulation is an underlying risk factor for many mental health disorders. Two common ways it shows up in people’s lives are rumination and emotion-related impulsivity, which are linked to deficits in cognitive control. The Neurobehavioral Affective Control Training (N-ACT) project focuses on testing a novel cognitive training...

Sheri Johnson - Professor, Psychology

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

This project explores how emotion influences reasoning in the context of bipolar disorder. By examining the effect of emotion on reasoning, we aim to better understand how individuals develop beliefs often associated with the disorder...

Keith Johnson - Professor, Linguistics

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

This project aims to document conversational speech of ordinary people of all ages and backgrounds who grew up in Oakland. Our main interest is in how people pronounce their words - is there an "Oakland accent" but the recordings are also social records from people spanning a wide range of age...

Amy Joy - Professor, Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology

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

This project seeks 3 or 4 student to continue my research to update and add current controversial topics for my NST 24 undergraduate class: Eating Green: The science behind the grassroots food movement. This Part 3 project will seek new topics as well as creative ideas to enhance the learning...

Amy Joy - Professor, Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology

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

This project researches current topics in nutrition and health for my undergraduate class ("Eating Green: The science behind the grassroots food movement"). My class is a small-group class that uses a discussion format to cover a range of controversial questions (eg. Are organic foods better?). Currently teaching this class...

Rosemary Joyce - Professor, Anthropology

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

Archaeology of Honduras This project will contribute to completion of reports on archaeological field projects conducted in Honduras between 1980 and 2009 and preparation of original data for digital archiving in the US and Honduras...

Jerome Karabel - Professor, Sociology

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

Outlier Nation: The Roots and Consequences of American Exceptionalism The United States has always been exceptional – both for better and for worse. Its distinctive form of democratic capitalism has made the United States the world leader in scientific and technological innovation, the world's leading economy, and home to (by some...

Kourtney Kawano - Professor, Education

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

This project is a systematic review of AANHPI teachers and how they are discussed across peer-reviewed scholarship to date. The project's goals are to 1) map the field of research on AANHPI K–12 educators by identifying peer-reviewed sources published to date, 2) examine thematic trends in how...

Shreeharsh Kelkar - Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Field (ISF)

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

The term "AI" or "artificial intelligence" is now regularly splashed across news articles and op-eds; most people have some, if vague, idea of what AI means. But the term today does not mean what it used to mean: in the last two decades, the crop of technologies we now...

Shreeharsh Kelkar - Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Field (ISF)

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

For many ordinary people, the term "Cambridge Analytica"--even if they are not sure exactly what the controversy is about--brings forth some association with the topics of election interference, psychological manipulation, illicit hacking, Russian disinformation, and Facebook. The truth is that it had very little to do with any...

Shreeharsh Kelkar - Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Field (ISF)

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

Political scientists have noticed a large contemporary trend in the US where high-income college-educated people tend to vote Democratic rather than Republican, a reversal of earlier patterns; they have labeled this as "education polarization". Education polarization is best illustrated through the case of Prop 22 in California. In...

Shreeharsh Kelkar - Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Field (ISF)

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

In October 2012, the Harvard Business Review declared “data scientist” to be the “sexiest job of the 21st century.” Part of a "Spotlight package" on the power of "big data" and its potential to change organizations and management, the articles in the issue collectively argued that with the growth of...

Andrew Kim - Professor, Anthropology

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

Biotechnological innovations have forced us to reconsider the extent to which our histories and environments shape our health and biology, which has provided new perspectives on old debates from the eugenics movement such as ideas about "biological and genetic superiority", the conceptual relevance of “biological race", and threats of “degeneration...

Andrew Kim - Professor, Anthropology

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

This project will examine the roles of early life stress and lifecourse trauma exposure on long COVID outcomes. Long COVID is a cluster of symptoms that is known to result from a cascade of pathophysiological mechanisms that persist beyond the acute stage of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Growing research suggests...

Andrew Kim - Professor, Anthropology

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

Israel’s genocide in Gaza has killed 7.9% of the population, and thousands of Palestinians have faced myriad forms of violence and imminent threats to life, including physical injuries from ballistics, home demolitions, and torture. These highly traumatic conditions pose severe physical and psychological threats to Palestinians and may have reverberating...

Michael Kiparsky - Director, Wheeler Water Institute, Center for Law, Energy and the Environment

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

Our team has co-developed a novel incentive structure that can encourage landowners to infiltrate water into the ground. We hope to work with a URAP student to advance the functionality of an existing cost-benefit analysis (CBA) tool that helps evaluate the potential for such projects. The ultimate outcome...

Michael Kiparsky - Director, Wheeler Water Institute, Center for Law, Energy and the Environment

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

Innovation is sorely needed in water resources – water is managed under technological and legal systems that have developed too slowly to respond to changes such as increasing population, land use change, and developments in ecological understanding. Water resources are governed by a multitude of factors, including legal, regulatory, economic, hydrologic...

Alexa Koenig - Co-Faculty Director, Human Rights Center

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

Thank you for your interest in the Investigations Lab. Please complete the Google form and this application [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScQDG8jqX1YE2GWvBpl-a9LBj-32VOZV8fJlaMQZzaE_sGAIA/viewform?usp=dialog]. You will not be considered unless you have completed both the URAP application and the supplemental questionnaire. The HRC Lab is...

Laura Kray - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This project examines behavior, beliefs, and attitudes relevant to gender differences in career attainment. Using a variety of methods, including experimental studies, correlational studies, and archival analyses, this project seeks to understand organizational barriers limiting gender equality in compensation and advancement and to identify interventions aimed at mitigating them. Some...

Laura Kray - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This project examines how power differently impacts men and women's experiences of the workplace. Power leads people to experience a number of psychological changes, however these changes may manifest differently in men and women. To investigate this question, we will run correlational studies, social science experiments, and interviews...

Laura Kray - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

In this project, we are interested in how people experience question and answer periods after talks about research. The research in this project is centered around how do people judge the questions other people ask and how does that make them in turn feel. For our next study, we would...

Christopher Kutz - Professor, Legal Studies

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

We are looking for an energetic undergraduate passionate about moral, political, and legal philosophy who can help with the intellectual life of the Kadish Center. You'll be involved in helping to choose events and speakers, enagaging in their work, and helping to foster a broader audience among undergraduates in particular...

Marika Landau-Wells - Professor, Political Science

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

People are exposed to stories of all kinds in their daily lives, including appealing but false stories such as conspiracy theories. One way to understand the causal influence of stories on beliefs and behaviors is to use them as experimental treatments. The outcomes of these experiments can vary widely depending...

Marika Landau-Wells - Professor, Political Science

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

Threat perception has always played a major role in foreign and domestic policy-making. From Covid to climate change to terrorism, policy-makers have made decisions about which potential threats to address and which to ignore. This project investigates how policy-makers in the U.S. and in other countries determine...

Marika Landau-Wells - Professor, Political Science

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

Neuroscientists have studied the brain's response to threatening stimuli since the earliest days of brain imaging. Yet there is no single catalogue of threat perception studies and their findings. Meta-analysis involves using data from many studies to characterize the collective state of knowledge in a field. This project seeks...

Marika Landau-Wells - Professor, Political Science

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

Social scientists often assign categorical values to text data in order to structure it (e.g., categorizing statements made by Congress members as pro- or anti-immigration). Traditionally, this coding has been done manually by humans who read and categorize the texts of interest. This method risks both systematic error (e.g...

Armando Lara-Millan - Professor, Sociology

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

Sometimes ideas about changing market signals can actually precede big changes in the economy, other times they can be too late, and sometimes those ideas can even cause changes. This project tracks ideas about three broad ongoing disruptions to the current global economic order. The first is that since 2011...

Armando Lara-Millan - Professor, Sociology

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

This project investigates the effects of market institutions on healthcare innovation and its consequences for inequality and wages. Specifically, the effect of the national medical code scheme on the ability of innovators to bring medical innovations (procedures, devices, diagnostics) to market. We will be assembling a large data set that...

Barbara Laraia - Professor, Public Health

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

As human life spans increase, so do the risk of developing chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases. For example, cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death among women. These chronic conditions can take a lifetime to develop. Poor quality diets, stress, eating patterns and socioeconomic...

Gabriel Lenz - Professor, Political Science

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

US cities continue to experience a criminal justice nightmare with high rates of interpersonal violence, police violence, and incarceration. When did this nightmare start? Why did it start? In preliminary work, I've found that this nightmare appears to have begun in Jim Crow southern cities around 1900. This finding suggests...

Gabriel Lenz - Professor, Political Science

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

Unions are one of the few democratic institutions within the workplace. However, the institutional structure of unions can encourage or constrain democracy within unions. I am interested in investigating the inner workings of union locals by collecting data on union local constitutions and bylaws, and collective bargaining agreements. Additionally, unions...

Gabriel Lenz - Professor, Political Science

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

Research apprentices will assist with a project studying the racial identity and racial attitudes of white Democrats. This group has become markedly more liberal on race-related issues over the past decade, and scholars don’t know exactly why. This projects help to explain this shift by exploring how white survey...

Gabriel Lenz - Professor, Political Science

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

This project has two parts. Part 1 looks at how the news media shapes policy outcomes and whether disparities in coverage lead to policy inequity. Can we show convincing evidence that news coverage of pedestrian fatalities leads to a change in local transportation policy? Are certain communities more likely to...

David Levine - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

Most poor women face challenges with menstrual hygiene. The results are staying home during one's period (limiting work and school), fear of leaks, infections, and high cost of single-use products. We are running two trials in Tamil Nadu and in Karnataka on distribution of menstrual cups. It would be...

David Levine - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

We are developing a curriculum based on stories, games and engaging activities to teach about health in poor nations (wash hands with soap, etc...

David Levine - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

Roughly 1.5 billion poor people receive healthcare from roughly 1.5 million community health workers (CHWs). CHWs are typically women with limited education and minimal training. ChatGPT, GPT4 and their peers should be able to provide high-quality support, especially if trained on the local clinical guidelines. We have a prototype...

David Levine - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

We’re evaluating a program distributing free Oral Rehydration Salts (ORS) to treat diarrhea as an add-on to distributing seasonal antimalarials in Chad. We’re looking for a highly organized undergraduate to assist with document and data tracking, data cleaning, and project documentation...

Robin Lipsky - Director of Inclusion Programming, Berkeley Judicial Institute

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

The Berkeley Judicial Institute (BJI) aims to establish an effective bridge between the legal academy and the judiciary for the primary purpose of promoting an ethical, resilient and independent judiciary. By creating this much needed synergy between the legal academy and the judiciary, BJI also seeks to address the concern...

Brooke Lober - Lecturer, Gender and Women's Studies

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

This is a new, critical study of the past 50 years of Jewish feminist, queer and trans social movement history in the US. Its focus is on understanding Zionism and anti-Zionism in the context of the US and Israel’s entwined racial-sexual politics, through analyses of relationships between state...

Xiaobo Lü - Professor, Political Science

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

How do political parties and rebel groups strengthen their organizations while simultaneously waging violent struggles against external rivals? This project investigates this question by examining the formative period of party building within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1927 to 1945. Founded in 1921, the CCP soon became embroiled in...

Kristin Luker - Professor, Law, Sociology

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

This project is part of an forthcoming book on how contraception and abortion, common parts of American family life throughout much of American history, came to be regulated in the late 19th century, became liberalized a century later, and are now the focus of intense political controversy. That regulation has...

Lisa Maher - Professor, Anthropology

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

About 10,000 years ago in Southwest Asia farming communities began to settle in large villages and produce their own food; forever changing the social and physical landscape of this region. However, the emergence of social complexity and the dramatic social and economic changes that led to the origins of agriculture...

Ulrike Malmendier - Professor, Economics

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

We are looking for highly motivated apprentices interested in behavioral economics or behavioral finance research for the 2025 fall semester. You will find below the list of open projects. Expectations: - Undergraduates will be required to complete assignments weekly. They will also be required to fill out weekly reports detailing the...

Ulrike Malmendier - Professor, Economics

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

One of the most exciting areas of research in economics is “Law and Economics/Finance." This research starts from a central question in economics: What are the causes of financial development and economic growth? Why do some countries flourish while others do not? The “Law and Finance” literature suggests that...

Angela Marino - Professor, Latinx Research Center

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

The Democracy + Media Lab seeks students with strong writing and/or digital media skills to assist in developing articles, visual media, documentary production, and podcasts. Successful candidates will join a team of other students to plan, record, edit, and publish research materials on social justice and democracy in the American...

Robin Marsh - Senior Researcher, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues

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

We are generating quantitative and qualitative data from several research instruments to understand the multiple impacts of women-led organic vegetable gardening in Western Uganda. These instruments include 24 hour recall and food security surveys, general demographics, gardening and welfare questionnaires, and narrative stories. This fall semester we will complete...

William Martinez - Professor , UC San Francisco

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

The present study is a randomized control trial to evaluate the efficacy and effectiveness of a school-based group prevention program (Fuerte) in San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Public Schools. Fuerte targets newcomer Latinx immigrant youth (five years or less post arrival in the U.S.) who are at risk...