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Project Descriptions
Fall 2025

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Showing 43 projects out of 293 found. On page 6 out of 6.
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East Bay Financial Needs Study (EBFNS): Exploring how financial strain impacts parent-child interactions

Mahesh Srinivasan - Professor, Psychology

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

Differences in academic achievement between high and low socioeconomic status (SES) children arise at a very early age. Understanding the factors that give rise to these differences is essential for understanding the intergenerational transmission of poverty. The East Bay Financial Needs Study (EBFNS) tests the idea that the psychological experience...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences

Organizational Culture, Interpersonal Networks, and Organizational Performance

Sameer Srivastava - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

Professor Sameer Srivastava uses computational methods to: (1) unpack the complex interrelationships between group culture, individual cognition, and interpersonal networks; and (2) examine how they jointly relate to individual attainment and organizational performance. Professor Srivastava directs the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation and the Berkeley-Stanford Computational Culture...

 Social Sciences   Engineering, Design & Technologies

The Threshold of Architecture: Data Center Design at Borders

Nicole Starosielski - Professor, Film Studies

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

The design of data centers carries significant implications for our understanding of sustainability, national sovereignty, and the sociopolitical nature of infrastructure, yet architectural perspectives are largely absent from contemporary scholarship. Architecture plays a crucial role in shaping social life, the environment, and concretizing borders. This project brings architecture to the...

 Arts & Humanities   Social Sciences   Engineering, Design & Technologies   Environmental Issues

Unveiling and Communicating the Hidden Environmental Costs Internet Infrastructures

Nicole Starosielski - Professor, Film Studies

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

Over the past two years, Berkeley undergraduates have been researching the hidden environmental costs of the internet, publishing their findings in industry journals, presenting at high profile industry and academic conferences, and teaching over 125 students from 32 different majors in a DeCal called Building A Sustainable Internet. We are...

 Arts & Humanities   Social Sciences   Engineering, Design & Technologies   Environmental Issues

Fission Impossible: Community Engagement, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors & Data Centers

Nicole Starosielski - Professor, Film Studies

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

Data centers are currently responsible for 4% of United States power usage, and that number is projected to increase to 6.7-12% in 2028. Companies in the sector are increasingly considering nuclear energy (and specifically small modular reactors) to power their data centers, but missing from these conversations (and the research...

 Arts & Humanities   Social Sciences   Engineering, Design & Technologies   Environmental Issues

Africa's Contemporary International Relations

Scott Straus - Professor, Political Science

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

How should scholars conceptualize contemporary African International Relations? In today’s increasingly multipolar world, many African states are dialing back relations with traditional partners—such as France—and engaging with a broader suite of states outside the region. While China has been increasingly active on the continent since the 1990s, several...

 Social Sciences

Bear Bones Lab URAP Project 1: Picuris Pueblo Collaborative Zooarchaeology

Jun Sunseri - Professor, Anthropology

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

The Picuris Pueblo Collaborative Field Program is a community-based archaeological and anthropological project between the University of Arizona, Columbia University, Southern Methodist University, and Picuris Pueblo in New Mexico near Taos. The project is seeking to map and record the outlying field structures surrounding the present-day Pueblo. Melanie...

 Engineering, Design & Technologies   Social Sciences

Bear Bones Lab URAP Project 2: Colfax-Todds Valley and Shingle Springs Intertribal Ecological Restoration (INTER crew) support

Jun Sunseri - Professor, Anthropology

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

Our partnered project is a community-based, collaborative partnership involving Berkeley archaeologists and the Colfax-Todds Valley and Shingle Springs InterTribal Ecological Restoration (INTER) Crew. Tribal Leaders from Colfax-Todds Valley Considated Tribes and Shingle Springs Band of Miwok mentor our research at their Ancestral Places in the foothills of...

 Engineering, Design & Technologies   Social Sciences

Bear Bones Lab URAP Project 3: Recovering Missing American Airmen Project

Jun Sunseri - Professor, Anthropology

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

The Archaeological Research Facility is teaming with us to develop detailed photorealistic 3D models of WW2 aircraft that went down in remote areas. The project team has begun detailed photo documentation of vintage aircraft in museums and private collections to understand what airframe components (hard points and high-density parts...

 Engineering, Design & Technologies   Social Sciences

URAP Project 4: Ghost Ranch Collaborative Zooarchaeology

Jun Sunseri - Professor, Anthropology

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

The Ghost Ranch rockshelter archaeology project is a community-based archaeological and anthropological project between the University of California and Ghost Ranch Museums in New Mexico near Abiquiu. The project is seeking to map and record the features in a 3000 year old rockshelter site for which out team is...

 Engineering, Design & Technologies   Social Sciences

Co-speech gestures accompanying use of conditionals and modals

Eve Sweetser - Professor, Linguistics

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

It has long been known that co-speech gesture reveals aspects of on-line cognition which may not be revealed in speech itself. This project investigates the usage of gestures accompanying modals (e.g. CAN, MUST, MAY, SHOULD) and conditionals (IF-clauses), to see what understandings of modality and conditional relationships...

 Social Sciences

Integrated metaphor description project - metaphors for COVID and the pandemic, and metaphors for global climate change.

Eve Sweetser - Professor, Linguistics

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

This group is a multilingual project, examining discourse about COVID-19 and about global climate change, in North American English, French and Spanish varieties, as well as in French of France. (A side project on Mandarin metaphor is not funded, but is also ongoing.) We are using the Coronavirus corpus...

 Social Sciences

Facebook for Vikings: Social Networks and the Icelandic Sagas

Timothy Tangherlini - Professor, Scandinavian

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

The Icelandic Family Sagas are an intriguing window onto the social world of 10th and 11th century Iceland, seen through the authorial lens of late medieval writers. A striking characteristic of the sagas is the abundance of characters that interact in and across complex social networks as they first initiate...

 Arts & Humanities   Social Sciences   Digital Humanities and Data Science

The Digital Berkeley Folklore Archive

Timothy Tangherlini - Professor, Scandinavian

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

The Berkeley folklore archive is one of the largest, student-created folklore archives in North America. Started in the 1960s, the archive houses over 500,000 records detailing the everyday life and informal culture of thousands of students and their communities. In 2020, the archive began digitizing these records. Along with...

 Arts & Humanities   Social Sciences   Digital Humanities and Data Science

Increasing school-based physical activity and socioemotional learning for elementary students: studying the impact of a new California law mandating 30 minutes of daily recess in public schools (YEDI affiliated)

Hannah R. Thompson - Professor, Public Health

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

School recess is an evidence-backed approach to increase school-based opportunities for students to play, accrue necessary physical activity, and socialize with peers, to the benefit of their physical, academic, and socioemotional health. As such, the Centers for Disease Control recommend at least 20 min of daily recess in...

 Biological & Health Sciences   Social Sciences

Federal Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program research (YEDI Affiliated)

Hannah R. Thompson - Professor, Public Health

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

The federal Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) is one of the nation’s most effective public health nutrition programs. It provides free, healthy foods and personalized nutrition education, breastfeeding support and referrals to other services for over 6.8 million low-income pregnant and postpartum women and...

 Biological & Health Sciences   Social Sciences

AI, Algorithms, and Accountability in Education, YEDI-affiliated

Eos Trinidad - Professor , Education

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

This research focuses on how Generative AI, predictive algorithms, and school accountability (i.e., AAA) are transforming instruction, student engagement, and interpersonal relationships in higher education. Using in-depth longitudinal interviews of undergraduate and graduate students, the study attempts to understand not just how technologies affect humans, but also how technologies...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Research and Evaluation of UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics - Psychedelic Facilitation Certificate Program

Tina Trujillo - Professor, Education

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

At the Berkeley Psychedelic Facilitation Certificate Program, advanced professionals are learning how to safely, effectively, and equitably support clients, patients, and study participants in psychedelic-assisted healing and research settings. In the 2024-25 academic year, the Program will welcome its third cohort of learners to participate in a 200-hour...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

PROJECT 1: Safe Drinking Water and Risk Communication in the Central Valley; Please INDICIATE THE SPECIFIC PROJECT(S) OF INTEREST in your application and INDICATE PROJECT NUMBER(S)

Winston Tseng - Research Scientist, Public Health

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

PROJECT 1. The Central Valley towns of Allensworth is partnering with Gadgil Lab and Health Research for Action at UC Berkeley on a research project funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and National Alliance for Water Innovation. This project is about assessing community perspectives on water safety, community education, and...

 Biological & Health Sciences   Social Sciences

Project 2: Evaluation of Hmong Cultural Center of Butte County Zoosiab Mental Health Program for Older Adults; Please INDICIATE THE SPECIFIC PROJECT(S) OF INTEREST in your application and INDICATE PROJECT NUMBER(S)

Winston Tseng - Research Scientist, Public Health

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

The goal of the project is to conduct an evaluation of the Zoosiab program, a community-based prevention and early intervention program that aims to prevent and/or reduce further mental health problems and social isolation among Hmong elders by strengthening sense of community and social engagement, improving both psychological...

 Biological & Health Sciences   Social Sciences

Project 3: Bay Area Pacific Islander Data Equity Project; Please INDICIATE THE SPECIFIC PROJECT(S) OF INTEREST in your application and INDICATE PROJECT NUMBER(S)

Winston Tseng - Research Scientist, Public Health

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

The purpose of the project is to monitor and increase the visibility of Pacific Islander (PI) health disparities and align local health department efforts in the counties of San Francisco, Alameda, and San Mateo to be more inclusive and effective in serving PI communities. The project activities include conducting a...

 Biological & Health Sciences   Social Sciences

AI Language Technologies in Language Education

Kimberly Vinall - Executive Director, Berkeley Language Center

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

AI language technologies offer new potentials and new challenges for language instruction and language learning. This project aims to explore how students actually use AI tools for language learning while writing. This project is hosted by the Berkeley Language Center (BLC), whose mission is to support research in applied language...

 Social Sciences   Arts & Humanities

A) Global Order Framework Project and B) Market Governance and Inequality in the United States and Japan.

Steven Vogel - Professor, Political Science

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

I will be actively working on several projects in Fall 2025. 1) I will be conducting research for an international project sponsored by the Canon Institute in Japan called the Global Order Framework Project. The project goals include developing guidelines and metrics for monitoring the behavior of governments and firms...

 Social Sciences

Archival Research and Media Production with Arhoolie Foundation

Bryan Wagner - Professor, English

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

Berkeley's Folklore Program is working with Arhoolie Foundation on several projects involving their extraordinary archive of recordings, photographs, films, and manuscripts related to vernacular music and the vernacular arts broadly conceived. Arhoolie Foundation nonprofit organization rooted in the life's work of its founder Chris Strachwitz and his acclaimed independent label...

 Social Sciences   Engineering, Design & Technologies

African American Quilt Documentation Study Group

Bryan Wagner - Professor, English

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

The Berkeley Folklore Program is partnering with Berkeley Art Museum to support for the African American Quilt Documentation Study Group -- a Bay Area nonprofit that maintains a registry of quilt stories that will eventually be catalogued at the Library of Congress. The work for URAP position involves organizing metadata and...

 Social Sciences   Engineering, Design & Technologies

Digital Folklore Archive

Bryan Wagner - Professor, English

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

The Folklore Archive is seeking a detail-oriented student to help digitize archival materials. This role provides a hands-on opportunity to engage with archival processes and contribute to the preservation and dissemination of rich cultural materials from the Berkeley Folklore Archive. No prior experience in archival work or digitization...

 Social Sciences   Engineering, Design & Technologies

Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California

Bryan Wagner - Professor, English

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

The Berkeley Folklore Program is partnering with Berkeley Art Museum to support an extraordinary exhibit, Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California (June 7, 2025 — November 30, 2025). The work for this URAP team involves supporting the museum's marketing and communications department in creating media to promote the...

 Social Sciences   Engineering, Design & Technologies

Climate Action Team - Health

Julia Walsh - Professor Emerita, Public Health

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

California’s climate policies are models for many other states and internationally. We will advocate and lobby and for important pending Climate legislation in the CA Assembly and Senate. We will assess pending climate policies for health impact and benefits. The first major bill is Make Polluters Pay CA Climate Superfund...

 Biological & Health Sciences   Social Sciences

Encouraging Deep Learning about Culture at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology: Studies of Our Visitors and Surrounding Community

Linda Waterfield - Head of Registration, Hearst Museum of Anthropology

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

The Hearst Museum of Anthropology, located in Anthropology & Art Practice Building, has educational offerings that combine the exciting work of Berkeley researchers with perspectives from community members, looking at how they relate to the cultures and objects represented in the collection. We encourage visitors to think deeply about questions of...

 Social Sciences   Arts & Humanities   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Marketing and Design Apprenticeship

Linda Waterfield - Head of Registration, Hearst Museum of Anthropology

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

The Development Department at the Hearst Museum focuses on projects that support the larger goals of the Museum: marketing, fundraising, communications, and project development. Students will be involved in researching museum membership strategies and designing digital and print marketing materials. Students will also be tasked with creating and evaluating engaging...

 Social Sciences   Arts & Humanities   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Registration Apprenticeship

Linda Waterfield - Head of Registration, Hearst Museum of Anthropology

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

The Registration division oversees and manages collection object documentation. URAP students will assist in the transformation of once hidden collections to fully accessible collections through: · Processing New Collections Acquisitions · Research and Cataloging of Existing Collections · Archives Inventory and Needs Assessment: Library and Publications · Archives Inventory and Finding Aid Creation: Research...

 Social Sciences   Arts & Humanities   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Understanding slow change blindness

David Whitney - Professor, Psychology

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

Attentive observers fail to notice otherwise obvious changes when the change takes place gradually, a phenomenon called slow change blindness. This striking inability to notice large changes raises questions about how perception is generated across time. One integration method that would plausibly lead to slow change blindness is a reliance...

 Social Sciences   Digital Humanities and Data Science   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Serial dependence in skin lesion judgements

David Whitney - Professor, Psychology

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

Previous work in the lab has shown that observers exhibit biases in their judgements of skin lesion malignancy, which depend on the previously shown lesion. For example, after viewing a benign lesion, observers tend to report that the current lesion is also benign if the two lesions are similar in...

 Social Sciences   Digital Humanities and Data Science   Education, Cognition & Psychology

How do we register the flow of time in natural movies?

David Whitney - Professor, Psychology

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

Accurately knowing the timing of different events happening around us is a crucial ability of all human beings. In natural scenes such as movies or everyday life, dynamic events could happen either in the left or right visual field. Given that information coming through our left visual field will be...

 Social Sciences   Digital Humanities and Data Science   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Investigating Human Emotion Perception.

David Whitney - Professor, Psychology

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

The ability to quickly and accurately perceive emotion is essential in our daily lives. However, how does the brain process multiple sources of emotional information when making emotional judgments? The brain must take into consideration facial expression, tone of voice, body movement, contextual information, and even beliefs in its judgment...

 Social Sciences   Digital Humanities and Data Science   Education, Cognition & Psychology

An Atlas of African Kingdoms

Martha Wilfahrt - Professor, Political Science

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

How does the precolonial past influence contemporary African politics? This question animates a growing literature on precolonial legacies, yet this work has been hindered by imprecise and incomplete data on the nature of precolonial political organization. This project builds an original Atlas of Africa's precolonial polities in the 19th century...

 Social Sciences

Subnational Colonial state-building in Africa

Martha Wilfahrt - Professor, Political Science

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

The construction of the African colonial state saw extensive re-arranging of political space as European colonial powers sought to extend their control across newly claimed territories. In many cases, these subnational boundaries largely persist to the present, raising the question of how colonial visions of state-building influence contemporary...

 Social Sciences

The Origins of Africa’s Opposition Strongholds

Martha Wilfahrt - Professor, Political Science

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

In an era of democratic instability and electoral autocracy, understanding when and where viable opposition parties emerge is critical. This question is particularly pressing in sub-Saharan Africa, where opposition parties vary in their capacity to contest elections. This project seeks to a) develop a descriptive dataset of the region’s...

 Social Sciences

Critically Conscious Computing Research: Pre-service teacher programs

Michelle Wilkerson - Professor, Education

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

My research so far has focused on how teacher education programs incorporate justice and critical consciousness into K-12 computer science curricula. By investigating both their theoretical foundations and the lived experiences of CS pre-service teachers (PSTs), I have found significant variance in how these programs prepare educators to...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology   Engineering, Design & Technologies

Critical Reasoning for College Readiness: An assessment development project in computational thinking

Mark Wilson - Professor, Education

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

Critical Reasoning for College Readiness (CR4CR) is a project that seeks to develop psychometrically sound assessments that can be used by teachers in the classrooms at the high school and early college levels. Our goal is to develop, revise, and validate a suite of assessments, including unique assessment tasks and...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences   Digital Humanities and Data Science

Who has the president's attention? Evidence from the presidential diaries

Guo Xu - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This project studies the time use of presidents by digitizing and leveraging the presidential diaries (1900-2017). The presidential diaries contain hourly information about activities and meetings of presidents throughout history, allowing us to take an unusually close look at how different political leaders allocate their time and attention...

 Social Sciences

Does studying business ethics make MBAs more ethical?

Guo Xu - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

Many business schools offer a course on business ethics. Does being exposed to business ethics make you a more ethical business leader? Despite being a simple question, the answer is quite ambiguous. This project aims to answer the question...

 Social Sciences

Bilingual and socioemotional development of children in immigrant families

Qing Zhou - Professor, Psychology

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

Professor Qing Zhou’s Family and Culture Lab (https://zhoulab.berkeley.edu/) aims to investigate cultural, contextual, and temperament influences on socio-emotional/mental health, academic, executive function, and language development from childhood to young adulthood, with a particular focus on children/youth of immigrant families. We have multiple ongoing research projects investigating...

 Social Sciences   Biological & Health Sciences

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