URAP

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

Design and development of a nonplanar vehicle dynamics simulator capable of accurately modeling and analyzing the behavior of vehicles on variable road surface geometries and conditions. The simulator will allow users to customize both the terrain properties and the vehicle configuration. Key features include: 1. Road Surface Customization: Users can...

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

This project builds upon an existing 1/10-scale off-road autonomous vehicle platform to explore and operate in unknown and changing environments, including sandy beaches, gravel, and forests. The control stack must make use of onboard sensors (RGBD camera, IMU) to map the environment and plan feasible and cost-effective...

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

The 1/10-scale Berkeley Autonomous Race Car (BARC) platform is used for demonstrating novel control algorithms and to support the vehicle dynamics course. This project involves building updated versions of the 1/10-scale BARC platform. While building the platforms the design and construction of the platform needs to be documented...

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

Status: Full- no new appr needed     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: Full- no new appr needed     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...

Sabrina Boyce - Professor, Public Health

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

p><strong>Faculty Mentor:</strong> Dr. Sabrina Boyce<br> <strong>Day-to-Day Supervision:</strong> Ricardo Vera Monroy, M.S. (Data Analyst) or Emma Jackson, M.P.H. (Program Manager)</p> <h3>Project Description</h3> <p>Sexual and dating violence (SV/DV) and child sexual abuse (CSA) have far-reaching health and social...

Anna Livia Brand - Professor, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning

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

This project explores how racism and racial geographies were reenacted after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. It traces the redevelopment of three neighborhoods and the evolution of planning processes and development decisions, asking who they most benefit and who they most exclude...

Anna Livia Brand - Professor, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning

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

Black meccas have been characterized by their economic and political opportunities and their cultural and social characteristics. Known for drawing African Americans to specific urban territories, black meccas have historically brought Blacks great social, economic, and psychological benefits, despite the vast inequalities and denigration they have faced in America. Yet...

Anna Livia Brand - Professor, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning

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

This project explores systems of patriarchy through a feminist lens, conceptualizing the everydayness and ubiquity of patriarchal power. Drawn initially from personal experiences, I am interested in naming the divergent array of patriarchal practices and conceptually mapping the various ways that patriarchy and anti-feminist systems imprint spatial and social...

Justin Brashares - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Monitoring the status of wildlife populations is critical to assessing ecosystem health. Rapid advances in machine learning have recently allowed researchers to deploy acoustic recorders that autonomously capture and classify animal vocalizations, such as birds calls. Currently, UC Berkeley is preparing to launching the first ever SoundHub -- an open source...

Justin Brashares - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Several aspects of global change are changing the dynamics of fire ecology across California and around the world. Recent fires have had devastating effects on livelihoods across the state, but little remains known of the direct and indirect impacts of these fires on wildlife species and the implications of those...

Justin Brashares - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Non-invasive techniques are increasingly valuable for ecologists to be able to collect data on the distribution, population sizes, behavior, and diet of wildlife species. The California Wolf Project led by Arthur Middleton and Justin Brashares at UC-Berkeley is teaming up with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife...

Steven Brenner - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

RNA-seq has been widely used in biological and medical research because of its capability to quantify transcriptome changes. Researchers usually use their impressions and experience to choose whether to analyze transcriptome changes in gene expression or alternative splicing levels. A more systematic way to determine whether to focus on...

Steven Brenner - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

Genome sequencing identifies a vast number of genetic variants. Predicting these variants’ molecular and clinical effects is one of the preeminent challenges in genetics. Accurate prediction of the impact of genetic variants improves our understanding of how genetic information yields molecular and cellular functions and is an essential step toward...

Steven Brenner - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

Proteins often fold into compact structural units, called domains. Protein domains are basic units of protein function and evolution. Delineating domain boundaries is a prerequisite for further analyses of protein structures. However, this process is largely a manual process and the accuracy of these computer programs is still not satisfactory...

Steven Brenner - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

Structural variants (SVs) encompass diverse genomic alterations spanning hundreds to millions of base pairs and can profoundly impact genome function by disrupting coding sequences, altering gene dosage, or perturbing regulatory landscapes. However, it remains challenging to determine which SVs contribute to disease due to their complex effects on gene regulation...

Charles Briggs - Professor, Latinx Research Center

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

Project Title: Documenting Latinx Contributions to Health Care Access and Services “That's what you call solidarity. Everybody pitching in, everybody doing their part. We each one, teach one, each one, reach one!” - Yolanda Chacon- Serna (labor organizer and health advocate) “Health is politics by other means.” Alondra Nelson, author of...

Travis Bristol - Professor, Education

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

Background: The Center for Research on Expanding Educational Opportunity (CREEO), launched by Faculty Director Travis J. Bristol, at UC Berkeley School of Education, uses research to shape policy and practice in service of creating opportunities for students and adults historically at the margins to move closer to the center in...

Travis Bristol - Professor, Education

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

Background: The Center for Research on Expanding Educational Opportunity (CREEO), launched by Faculty Director Travis J. Bristol, at UC Berkeley School of Education, uses research to shape policy and practice in service of creating opportunities for students and adults historically at the margins to move closer to the center in...

Travis Bristol - Professor, Education

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

Background: The Center for Research on Expanding Educational Opportunity (CREEO), launched by Faculty Director Travis J. Bristol, at UC Berkeley School of Education, uses research to shape policy and practice in service of creating opportunities for students and adults historically at the margins to move closer to the center in...

David Broockman - Professor, Political Science

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

Scholars and commentators argue that Congress is broken because both parties' politicians take increasingly extreme positions on issues, failing to listen to voters. However, these claims are based on assuming that politicians of both parties don't adjust which proposals they make as voters' demands and the world change. In other...

David Broockman - Professor, Political Science

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

In recent years, city councils across the United States have become significantly more diverse—in 2000, 62% of city councils were entirely white, but by 2021, only 24% were. Scholars have long argued that this kind of descriptive representation matters for minority communities, but we don't actually know much about...

Cara Brook - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

The Brook lab runs a longterm field research project, capturing and collecting biological samples for molecular analyses of zoonotic viruses from three species of wild fruit bat endemic to the island nation of Madagascar. The lab seeks a student researcher to carry out data cleaning, curation, and visualization when new...

Clair Brown - Professor, Economics

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

URAP team focuses on the Sustainable, Shared-Prosperity Policy Index (SSPI), which pulls together data for over 50 policies across 66 countries to evaluate how well national policies support people and the planet. The SSPI This year the SSPI team will analyze how policies vary across regions and across countries...

Clair Brown - Professor, Economics

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

This project focuses on the Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act, which is currently a bill being considered by the California legislature. Students will learn about the bill, and add to the economic analysis of the bill that earlier URAP teams did. Here is a report on the Economic Analysis of...

Timothy Brown - Professor, Public Health

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

This project will implement and disseminate the FUTUREPAIN validated questionnaire and implement an online intervention for chronic pain focused on the South Asian population. The project will us a phone app to collect data during the project. The project will use a cross-over randomized design...

Timothy Brown - Professor, Public Health

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

Large racial/ethnic disparities exist in medical care. Attenuation or removal of these disparities requires a rigorous understanding of the relevant underlying mechanisms. One such mechanism is high-quality physician-patient relationships. High-quality physician-patient relationships are associated with improved health outcomes and lower costs. However, such relationships appear...

Timothy Brown - Professor, Public Health

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

A growing literature in recent years has documented the economic returns-on-investment (ROI) in public health, but there is low public awareness of these results. This literature includes estimation of spending offsets when public health prevents the need for costly curative health care, as benefiting both private healthcare payers...

Timothy Brown - Professor, Public Health

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

This project will use simulation methods to determine the cost-effectiveness of mind-body interventions using data from randomized controlled trials, national survey data, and other resources. The goal is to publish a peer-reviewed article to help establish the value of these interventions in healthcare. This has not been...

Roland Burgmann - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

Earthquakes are influenced by the properties of faults. Our ability to characterize fault zones and determine how they impact earthquakes is limited. The goal of this project is to perform a multiscale analysis of the rock surrounding faults and explore how it may impact how faults slip and generate earthquakes...

Carlos Bustamante - Professor, QB3: Quantitative Biomedical Research

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

Optical tweezers are a method to exert force on individual molecules and directly measure forces generated during their biochemical reactions.[1] Molecules are tethered between double strand DNA (dsDNA) handles to micron-sized beads that are held in optical traps. The flexibility of these handles limits the resolution of optical...

Carlos Bustamante - Professor, QB3: Quantitative Biomedical Research

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

Optical tweezers are a method to exert force on individual molecules and directly measure forces generated during their biochemical reactions.[1] Molecules are tethered between double strand DNA (dsDNA) handles to micron-sized beads that are held in optical traps. The flexibility of these handles limits the resolution of optical...

Sydnee Caldwell - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This URAP project exposes students to early-stage research on topics in labor economics, including the gender wage gap and wage inequality. The URAP group will meet once a week with the professor (Sydnee), for about an hour. During that meeting, we will discuss progress, and next steps. Each apprentice...

Stephanie Canizales - Professor, Sociology

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

UC Berkeley is a premier migration research institution with a wealth of knowledge that can be powerfully leveraged by local organizations serving immigrant families in the region. The "Supporting Bay Area Immigrant Families" Project aims to survey immigration-related research produced by UC Berkeley scholars to create a publicly available...

Tamma Carleton - Professor, Agricultural and Resource Economics

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

We are looking for highly motivated students interested in conducting research and analyses on a project investigating the impacts of climate change on human migration at global scale. This research initiative aims to leverage large historical datasets to empirically quantify how human migration responds to climate change, both within and...

Maggie Chan - Professor, Education

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

Universal social-emotional and behavioral (SEB) screening in school is a recognized solution to the mental health crisis among children and youth. However, the effectiveness of school-based SEB screening to address this public health concern is contingent on the fairness and validity of the assessments. Most SEB screeners are...

Yu-Ling Chang - Professor, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment

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

The California Work Opportunities and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs) is a welfare-to-work (WTW) program that provides cash aid and services to needy families with children in California. In order to receive cash aid, adult enrollees are required to participate in work-related activities. Non-compliance will cause a...

Yu-Ling Chang - Professor, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment

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

This project aims to investigate the features of global welfare regimes with a focus on social protection systems. Dr. Yu-Ling Chang is collaborating with Dr. Julia Shu-Huah Wang at the National Taiwan University and social policy scholars from 20+ countries on this project. We use the model family...

Yu-Ling Chang - Professor, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment

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

Paid family leave benefits the well-being of workers and their family members (including newborns, adopted children, and ill family members) by offering partially or fully compensated time away from work for family caregiving. However, the U.S. is exceptional because it is the only wealthy country without a national-level...

Lu Chen - Professor, Optometry

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

Our research focuses on mechanisms and regulation of lymphatic and blood vessel formation and implications in eye diseases, such as glaucoma, inflammation, and transplant rejection. Lymphatic research represents of field of new discovery in recent years. A wide spectrum of in vitro and in vivo techniques are used in our...

Jan Christoph - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Our group studies heart rhythm disorders and cardiac pathophysiology. In our lab, we produce high-resolution imaging data of intact isolated hearts ex vivo. This data shows action potential waves propagating across the ventricular surface of isolated beating hearts. A common pathophysiology, which we simulate in this ex vivo setting...

Emmeline Chuang - Professor, Social Welfare

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

Medicaid is a public health insurance that in California, covers more than one in three Californians. CalAIM is a multiyear plan to transform California's Medicaid program (known as "Medi-Cal"). This project focuses on evaluating implementation of new Enhanced Care Management and Community Supports benefits in California's Medicaid program, and...

Susana Chung - Professor, Optometry

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

This research project focuses on the understanding of how the visual system works in people with normal vision, as well as in people with uncorrectable sub-normal vision (visual impairment). Uncorrectable sub-normal vision can occur as a result of an eye disease (e.g. macular degeneration, the leading cause of...

Susana Chung - Professor, Optometry

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

This research project focuses on the understanding of how the visual system responds to the onset of vision loss as a result of eye diseases. By understanding how the visual system responds to vision loss, our ultimate goal is to develop effective rehabilitative strategies to help people with vision loss...

Susana Chung - Professor, Optometry

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

The research project focuses on the understanding of how the visual system recognizes faces and other objects in normally sighted people and people with low vision. Psychophysical methods, retinal imaging and functional brain imaging will be used to answer the research question...

Susana Chung - Professor, Optometry

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

Loss of vision in the central visual field brings about dramatic changes to everyday activities (e.g. reading, identifying objects). This research project focuses on identifying how the informative features of objects contribute to overall visual function, with the clinical goal of visual performance improvement by enhancing selected parts of objects...

Carla Cicero - Emeritus Staff Curator, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     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...