URAP

Rosemary Joyce - Professor, Anthropology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

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. For 2026-2027 the focus is on zooarchaeology: the study of animals...

Yehuda Kalay - Professor, Architecture

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

How can AI help save lives during high-rise building fires? High-rise residential buildings present unique fire-safety challenges because of their high occupant density, complex evacuation conditions, and extended egress times. In 2023, San Francisco adopted a Fire Code amendment requiring automatic sprinkler retrofits in all residential high...

Jerome Karabel - Professor, Sociology

Status: Open     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: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: Off Campus

This project is a systematic review of AA&PI 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 AA&PI K–12 educators by identifying peer-reviewed sources published to date, 2) examine thematic trends...

Kourtney Kawano - Professor, Education

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: Off Campus

The purpose of this project is to uplift the unique contributions of AA&PI teacher-content creators in relation to perceptions about AA&PI communities and broader educational discourse on equity-focused and race-conscious policies and programs. We aim to identify thematic trends in AA&PI teacher-content creators...

Kourtney Kawano - Professor, Education

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: Off Campus

This project explores California-based Pacific Islander (PI) college students' experiences with identity formation, familial socialization, intergroup relations, and education for social change. Through qualitative research methods, this project aims to uplift collective sensemaking about the decisions that PI families make to perpetuate their linguistic and cultural ways of knowing...

Kourtney Kawano - Professor, Education

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: Off Campus

Although California school districts have been successful in defending students and teachers’ legal right to engage with complex issues and ideas in Ethnic Studies courses, these attacks have implications for educators’ capacities to teach without fear of surveillance and retaliation and potential consequences for Berkeley’s vision of a community in...

Waqas Khalid - Associate Scientist, QB3

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

Be the first to utilize/use cutting edge nanotechnology developed by Dr. Waqas Khalid, Berkeley Scientist and collaborators to solve problems in healthcare, energy and semiconductor industries. Join Dr. Khalid’s URAP program and learn about nanostructure based devices that have applications in monitoring human health, energy harvesting, energy storage, environmental...

Asir Intisar Khan - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

As nanoelectronics evolves, managing heat becomes critical, particularly in high-density 3D chips for AI workloads. Uneven power dissipation leads to localized ‘hot spots’ that compromise device reliability and safety. Current thermal management approaches, such as using high thermal conductivity materials, optimizing through-silicon vias, and passive cooling, often overlook...

Celeste Kidd - Professor, Psychology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

IMPORTANT NOTE: To apply, please fill out this Google Form to supplement your URAP application: https://forms.gle/rxjaxyWAbsoqSYqZ7 The Kidd Lab, directed by Professor Celeste Kidd, studies belief formation and learning using a combination of computational and behavioral methods. Our current research is focused on how children use AI models...

Alexa Koenig - Co-Faculty Director, Human Rights Center

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Thank you for your interest in the Investigations Lab. Our application for the Fall 2026 semester will open with the regular URAP cycle. A supplemental, google form application will be posted here when the URAP application cycle opens. The HRC Lab is a collaborative, innovative, student-driven space that conducts...

Yury Kolomensky - Professor, Physics

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Mu2e is a medium-scale Particle Physics experiment currently under construction at Fermi National Lab, with UCB and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as collaborating institutions. Mu2e will search for the ultra-rare process whereby a muon particle converts directly into an electron, without the emission of any neutrinos. Though not...

Yury Kolomensky - Professor, Physics

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Superconducting sensors, such as Transition-edge sensors (TESs) coupled with superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs), are used in many applications, from quantum computing to astrophysics to particle physics. For rare-events search experiments, such as neutrinoless double beta decay, a multiplexed readout is necessary for low-temperature experiments which operate...

Michelle Koo - Staff Curator, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Status: Open     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: Open     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...

Britt Koskella - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

For the last 10 years the Pear project (fire blight of pear trees) has been seeking to better understand how bacteriophage viruses impact the ability of two bacterial pathogens (Erwinia amylovora and Pseudomonas syringae) to colonize and infect pear trees around the city of Berkeley. We are tracking bacteria-phage...

Renaud La Joie - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive cognitive decline and accumulation of amyloid-β protein in the brain. Amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) enables visualization of amyloid deposition in vivo and can be used to determine the presence of amyloid plaques, supporting the diagnosis of AD. In...

Renaud La Joie - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) and exposure to repetitive head impacts (RHI) are common among military veterans and have been linked to an increased risk of cognitive impairment, psychiatric symptoms, and potentially neurodegenerative diseases later in life. Although not all individuals who are exposed to TBI or RHI experience long-term...

Renaud La Joie - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is characterized by the accumulation of abnormal proteins in the brain, including beta-amyloid (Aβ) pathology. Positron emission tomography (PET) imaging allows us to visualize and measure Aβ pathology in living people. The FDA approval of three Aβ-PET radiotracers has expanded the use of Aβ-PET...

Marika Landau-Wells - Professor, Political Science

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     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. My book investigates how policy-makers in the U.S. and in other countries determine...

Patricia Lang - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Climate change has dramatically reshaped plant life on Earth. Despite these widespread biological shifts creating serious challenges—such as mismatches in plant-biotic or plant-abiotic interactions—we still lack a comprehensive understanding of their molecular underpinnings. This project aims to characterize the genetic drivers underlying the most evident plant...

Adrian Lee - Professor, Physics

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

We are working on precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the relic thermal radiation that decoupled from the primordial plasma when the universe was just 0.003% of its current age. Measurements of the CMB have been central to the formation of the modern picture of the universe, and...

Adrian Lee - Professor, Physics

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a unique window to fundamental physics. It can be used to probe primordial gravitational waves, which are a distinct sign that the early universe has experienced an exponentially rapid expansion at its age of ~10^-32 seconds. The CMB photons also probe the properties...

Adrian Lee - Professor, Physics

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Our team specializes in the development, production, and evaluation of highly sensitive detectors, antennas, and readout electronics for a diverse range of cosmology experiments. These endeavors capitalize on the extraordinary properties of superconductivity and the principles of microwave engineering. Through the application of these cutting-edge techniques, we are interested...

Adrian Lee - Professor, Physics

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is the oldest light in the Universe, and carries invaluable information about the Universe’s history and evolution. The detection of primordial gravitational waves in the CMB polarisation, a smoking gun for cosmic inflation, is one of the biggest challenges in observational cosmology. To achieve the...

Peggy G. Lemaux - Professor of Cooperative Extension, Plant and Microbial Biology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

General Description and Research Approach. Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L. Moench) is the fifth most important cereal crop worldwide and serves as a major source of food, animal forage, and an emerging biofuel feedstock. Understanding the stomatal dynamics that enable sorghum to use water efficiently under drought and water-limited conditions...

Peggy G. Lemaux - Professor of Cooperative Extension, Plant and Microbial Biology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

New approaches are needed to capture larger amounts of atmospheric carbon with the goal of reducing atmospheric CO2 and slowing or perhaps even reversing global warming. Plants are a proposed scalable solution, with the potential to both capture atmospheric carbon through photosynthetic CO2 fixation and store it through carbon sequestration...

David Levine - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

AI agents can help with running a project from organizing knowledge and tracking reports to giving feedback on drafts and identifying potential donors...

David Levine - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Open     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. AI can help create localized code that slots into existing CHW software and provides clinicial decision support We have a prototype CHW Navigator system we...

David Levine - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Open     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...

Jennifer Lewis - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

The plant pathogen Pseudomonas syringae causes disease in a large number of different plant species, using the type III secretion system to secrete and translocate effector proteins into the plant. Many of these effector proteins are believed to function primarily in the suppression of host defense signaling. However recognition of...

Lu Liang - Professor, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Schoolyard trees are a low-cost, nature-based solution to environmental and social challenges, from reducing extreme heat and improving air quality to supporting student well-being. Research shows that access to trees can lower stress, boost attention, foster social connections, and even improve academic performance. However, many schools lack...

Fenyong Liu - Professor, Public Health

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

The long-term goals of our research are (1) to study the functions of genes of human herpes simplex virus (HSV) (the causative agent of genital herpes and cold sores) and cytomegalovirus (CMV) (the leading cause of congenital abnormalities in newborns and blindness and death in AIDS patients) in regulation...

Alexander Lowe - Research Scientist, Museum of Paleontology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project reconstructs plant communities and climate using fossil plants from sites representing 30 to 10 million years ago. During this time, there are well documented global climatic changes happening, including a global warming event (Miocene Climatic Optimum) and a global cooling event (the Middle Miocene Climatic Transition). This study...

Deborah Lustig - Associate Director, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Asian American women (AAW) occupy a distinct and often precarious position in the U.S. workforce, particularly within STEM workplaces that remain predominantly White and male. While there has been a renewed awareness of the harms of anti-Asian racism, less is known about how AAW cope with intersecting forms of...

Simo Makiharju - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Gas-liquid flows play an important role in the environment, and in many transportation, biological and industrial processes. The FLOW lab is presently studying 1) structures of gas jets in water, 2) gas entertainment by plunging water jets, 3) air-water flows for frictional drag reduction, and 4) forces on...

Ulrike Malmendier - Professor, Economics

Status: Open     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 2026 fall semester. The Experience Effects Book Professor Malmendier’s upcoming book combines all the insights she has gained through her extensive research on “experience effects” in economics. Experience effects refer to the ways...

Ulrike Malmendier - Professor, Economics

Status: Open     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...

Ulrike Malmendier - Professor, Economics

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project studies how predictability and control shape workers' response to economic stress. The project builds on a growing body of neuroscience research showing that the same stressful event — a job loss, a pay cut, an unpredictable schedule — can have very different effects on a person's mental health and long...

Angela Marino - Professor, Latinx Research Center

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     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 small team to plan, record, edit, and publish research materials on social justice and participatory democracy in the American hemisphere...

Leonardo Martinez - Professor, Public Health

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: Off Campus

Tuberculosis remains highly concentrated in prisons and other carceral settings, yet women deprived of liberty are often underrepresented in prison health research. This project will build on an existing systematic review of tuberculosis among incarcerated women globally and will help move the work toward a publishable manuscript. The review focuses...

Donald J. Mastronarde - Professor, Classics

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: Off Campus

This project involves research for a new and more complete edition of the scholia to Euripides. Scholia are annotations written in the margins and between the lines of medieval manuscripts of classical authors. In the scholia we find filtered through many generations of reuse parts of ancient scholarly discussions of...

Donald J. Mastronarde - Professor, Classics

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: Off Campus

Gaspar Stiblinus, a scholar working in Switzerland, produced a massive edition of the surviving plays of Euripides in Basel in 1562. His work is of interest because he is the first modern scholar to provide summaries and analyses of the plays. His edition is very rare (although now images of...

Marisa Medina - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

There are a limited number of human omics datasets that include menopausal status information for female subjects and include enough premenopausal and postmenopausal women. For instance, multi-omics data has been generated for thousands of All of Us Research Program participants. We will compare transcriptomic and proteomic profiles of premenopausal...

Marisa Medina - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Not all women reach menopause at the same time. Some of this inter-individual variation is due to underlying genetic differences between women. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been conducted to identify a list of common genetic variants that are associated with age at natural menopause. We would like...

Marisa Medina - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Electronic health record (EHR)-linked biobanks, such as the All of Us Research Program, do not contain reliable information about the timing of menopause for most women. Recent studies suggest that physiological changes associated with menopause can be detected through longitudinal patterns in routinely measured clinical biomarkers (e.g., in metabolic...

Marisa Medina - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Electronic health record (EHR)-linked biobanks, such as the All of Us Research Program, do not contain reliable information about the timing of menopause for most women. However, clinical notes can give additional clues about the timing of this important milestone in women's lives. The All of Us Research Program...

Dana Miller-Cotto - Professor, Education

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

The Community Practice Partnerships project seeks to build sustained relationships between the research team and organizations serving children and families throughout the Bay Area, including preschools, children’s museums, community organizations, and other informal learning spaces. These partnerships will create opportunities for researchers and community practitioners to learn from one another...

Dana Miller-Cotto - Professor, Education

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

Executive function, or our ability to hold information in mind, ignore distractions, and shift between goals, predicts many important outcomes in life, including educational outcomes and social development. Research indicates that there are differences in how children display executive function skills across race/ethnicity and socio-economic status. There is...

Dana Miller-Cotto - Professor, Education

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: Off Campus

This online study examines how children ages 8–10 use external supports to manage the demands of learning and problem solving. “Cognitive offloading” occurs when people reduce demands on memory or attention by using tools or actions outside the mind—for example, writing information down, drawing a representation, using fingers...