URAP

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...

Brooke Lober - Staff Researcher, Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry

Status: Open     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...

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...

Xiaobo Lü - Professor, Political Science

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

How do political parties mobilize citizens when elections are not the primary means of allocating political power? This project addresses this question by examining CCP party building from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Focusing on subnational variation, the project seeks to uncover the mechanisms underlying the CCP’s uneven organizational development...

Rita Lucarelli - Professor, MELC (Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures)

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

Ancient Egyptian coffins are covered with spells and images that work together as a kind of magical machine, designed to resurrect the deceased and guide them safely through the afterlife. Yet coffin texts are usually published as if they were independent texts, divorced from their physical position on the coffin...

Kam-Biu Luk - Professor, Physics

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

Neutrino is a sub-atomic particle that was thought to be massless. Recently, a new phenomenon called neutrino oscillation, a transformation of one type of neutrino to another kind, has been discovered in experiments. These important findings imply that neutrinos have mass and they can mix among themselves. Neutrino oscillations...

Kam-Biu Luk - Professor, Physics

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

This project will focus on applying contrastive learning and anomaly detection techniques to various DUNE prototype simulated and real datasets in order to identify deficiencies in our understanding of how neutrinos interact. The work will involve: preparing inputs from the DUNE simulation and data suitable for ML-libraries; development of...

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...

Michael Manga - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

The overall goal of this project is to understand how and why volcanoes erupt. This includes what happens when volcanoes erupt under the sea, how changes in sea-level and lake-level affect eruptions, and how eruptions evolve on ocean worlds (e.g., Saturn's moon Enceladus). For the first...

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...

Jimmy McGuire - Professor, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     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...

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...

Craig Miller - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

A fantastic diversity in organismal form is seen in nature, yet we know little about the genetic basis of evolutionary change. We are using the head skeleton of the threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) as a model system to study the genetic basis of development and evolution. Sticklebacks have undergone one...

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...

Joy Milligan - Professor, Law

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

The Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality Anti-Discrimination Law brings together academics, advocates and activists from six continents to address issues of systemic inequality and discrimination. The Center is directed by Law Professors Joy Milligan and David Oppenheimer. We are assisted by two recent Berkeley graduates who were URAP students...

Don Moore - Professor, Business, Haas School, Psychology

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

Have you ever scored lower on a test than you expected, lost a competition to a competitor you thought you would trounce, been certain about a fact only to have Google prove you incorrect? People are frequently overconfident. Understanding overconfidence can help us become more accurate about our self-perceptions...

Don Moore - Professor, Business, Haas School, Psychology

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

Human judgments are routinely biased. Can artificially intelligent agents correct for this human bias and achieve greater accuracy in their judgment...

Don Moore - Professor, Business, Haas School, Psychology

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

The scientific world is changing quickly as scientists improve their research practices and correct errors in the published record. This project seeks to test the replicability of published work that is now suspect. This is a chance to play a role in a project in the vanguard of open science...

Julian Motzkin - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

When pain becomes chronic, there can be changes in brain areas involved with processing pain signals. Our research combines fMRI of pain circuits with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), a type of non-invasive brain stimulation, to determine how rTMS may alleviate difficult-to-treat pain...

Julian Motzkin - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

The thermal grill illusion (TGI) is an illusion of burning pain created by interlaced innocuous warm and cool temperatures. Our lab is beginning to study this illusion as a measure of pain sensitivity in pain free adults, patients which chronic pain, and patients with mental health conditions like depression and...

Karen Nakamura - Professor, Anthropology

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

The Berkeley Disability Lab (https://disabilitylab.berkeley.edu/) has been involved in several projects surrounding disability, technology, art, activism, and access in the Bay Area. We welcome students from all fields of the university (arts, engineering, social sciences, communications, CS, design, music, architecture, etc.). People with personal experience of disability or exclusion...

Olivia Natan - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This URAP project exposes students to one or more of the ongoing projects in quantitative marketing and industrial organization, including topics on product variety, pricing, and consumer demand. Examples of ongoing projects include work on business models for AI firms, and consumer search and information processing. Projects will be supervised...

Eva Nogales - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Retrons are bacterial immune systems that help protect cells from viral infection. Many retrons remain poorly characterized, particularly those found in clinically important bacteria. This project will investigate a newly identified retron system from an ESKAPE pathogen using biochemical and structural approaches. The long-term goal is to understand how...

Moira O'Neill - Professor, Institute for Urban and Regional Development

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

The United States faces a housing crisis estimated to be on the order of 3-5 million units, threatening the financial security of families nationwide. Existing scholarship and research establishes that zoning laws and building codes can limit construction of more dense housing, like apartments, in cities and counties where we...

Daniel Okamoto - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Climate change is dramatically altering the oceans. These changes include increases in sea surface temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, and primary productivity. We use experiments and field data to assess how these changes affect the physiology, growth, reproduction, and behavior of marine animals. We have numerous samples from past experiments and...

Daniel Okamoto - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

This URAP opportunity in the Okamoto lab focuses on understanding the reproductive phenology of golden mussels (Limnoperna fortunei), a fast-spreading invasive species in the California river delta. Students participating in this URAP opportunity will conduct field work in the delta including mussel collections, collecting and deploying larval settlement plates...

Jessica Olney - Executive Director, International Studies, Institute of

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

This project engages students in research that supports the work of the human rights organization PAEMA (Preventing And Ending Mass Atrocities), a collaborator of the Berkeley Institute of International Studies (IIS). The Berkeley lead researcher, Jessica Olney, is a Non-Resident Fellow at PAEMA. PAEMA's Conflict News Monitoring program tracks...

David Oppenheimer - Professor, Law

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

Professor David Oppenheimer seeks 4-5 research apprentices to work with him on five book projects. They are 1) a series of essays on global systemic racism; 2) a simulated housing discrimination casefile used for teaching civil procedure; 3) a textbook on comparative equality and anti-discrimination law; 4) a legal...

Victor Ortega Jimenez - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Helicopters seeds (Samaras) are remarkable for their aerodynamic capabilities with insects wings. We Investigate the aerodynamics and kinematics of samaras in a vertical wind tunnel. The goal of this project is to understand the unsteady mechanisms they have to fly on unsteady flow conditions...

Victor Ortega Jimenez - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Water boatmen are renowned for their remarkable adaptations for both diving and flying. However, the physical mechanisms these insects employ to overcome the constraints imposed when transitioning between aquatic and aerial environments remain poorly understood. We investigate in the lab their locomotion performance using High-speed video and fluid dynamics...

Zachary Pardos - Professor, Education

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

The AskOski project (https://askoski.berkeley.edu/about) is a research and development effort led by Professor Pardos to transfer the latest in big data and machine learning research to the domain of course guidance in higher ed. The recommender system is live in-production at Berkeley, with partial deployments at several...

Zachary Pardos - Professor, Education

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

Adaptive tutoring systems are designed to provide students in K-12 and intro college courses a personalized homework experience. This means giving the right problem to a student at the right time based on a continuous assessment of their mastery of a skill. At Berkeley, the ALEKS system is used...

Laurie Pearce - Lecturer, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures

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

Are you interested in ancient civilizations and modern technologies? Would you like to contribute to the preservation of knowledge and cultural heritage? Do you have or would you like to develop skills with databases and project management? Research apprentices associated with the URAP project Ancient Texts, Modern Tools will assist...

Saul Perlmutter - Professor, Physics

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

Developing a deep understanding of complex public policy issues often requires more time than most citizens can reasonably devote. Because of this, political polls tend to measure people’s first impressions rather than what their more informed opinions might be. Deliberative Polling is a process designed to address this limitation. Participants...

Saul Perlmutter - Professor, Physics

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

It has been thought that the accelerated expansion of our universe is caused by an unknown "dark energy" which has a constant energy density. However, there are currently hints that dark energy is actually evolving over time. If this were true, there would be implications on fundamental physics and potentially...

Christine Philliou - Professor, History

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

This is a collaborative research and Digital Humanities project I initiated in 2020 and our team includes scholars in Greece, Turkey, and several other countries. We are reading Ottoman Turkish and Greek sources about the population of Greek Orthodox in Istanbul and creating data sets, and then visualizations and interactive...