URAP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carla Cicero - Emeritus Staff Curator, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology is a major repository for surveyed and/or salvaged North American wildlife, especially California species. We typical have several thousand frozen carcasses at any given time, with a large diversity of amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds. These carcasses come from many sources -- wildlife rescue...

Carla Cicero - Emeritus Staff Curator, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

Students will assist with research projects that investigate geographic variation and species limits in birds. Work may involve morphologic measurements, color measurements, DNA laboratory work, and/or sound analysis. Positions are not available every semester, and students must already have some experience in the MVZ working with specimens and data...

Michelle Koo - Staff Curator, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

The world's natural history museums are responsible for documenting over 1.8 billion species known as a result of 300 years of biological exploration of the planet. The information contained in museums include observational and specimen-based data, text, images, sound and video and form the foundation of what we know...

Michelle Koo - Staff Curator, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) is a vibrant research and informatics center for the campus and the natural history communities around the world. The world's natural history museums are responsible for documenting over 1.8 billion species known as a result of 300 years of biological exploration of the planet...

Jimmy McGuire - Professor, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

The island of Sulawesi in Indonesia is a hotspot of biodiversity and model system for studying the evolution of organisms. Our lab has conducted numerous expeditions to the island to document its biodiversity and collect samples for genetic analysis. Our lab uses molecular and morphological tools to reconstruct the evolutionary...

Jimmy McGuire - Professor, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

Amphibians are the world’s most imperiled vertebrate group. Confounding efforts to combat amphibian declines is that we have little knowledge concerning most of the species and much of it not easily accessible. Since 2000, we have been developing an informatics platform to create a web page for every species of...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carol Spencer - Staff Curator, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

We are taking new students for Prep Lab Assistant, Bone Numbering and Tag Tying, Bird, Herp, Fish and Mammal Curatorial Assistants. See descriptions below. At the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ), University of California, Berkeley, we offer many unique opportunities to participate in MVZ endeavors and learn about natural history...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amphibians -- frogs, salamanders, and caecilians -- exhibit a stunning variety of chemical defenses, ranging from antimicrobial peptides to antipredator neurotoxins and biological glues. Amphibian glues are the least-studied of these defenses. Additionally, the methods used to measure amphibian stickiness are not standardized, with some researchers gluing together beer cans to...

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

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

Amphibians -- frogs, salamanders, and caecilians -- exhibit a stunning variety of chemical defenses, ranging from antimicrobial peptides to antipredator neurotoxins and biological glues! These defenses generally co-occur with physiological, morphological, and behavioral adaptations that sometimes exhibit convergence with distantly related taxa. However, research into amphibian chemical defense has been far...