URAP

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...

Peter Oboyski - Sr. Museum Scientist, Essig Museum of Entomology

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

Areas of the East Bay hills have been undergoing habitat restoration, which includes the removal of Eucalyptus and other invasive plants and the promotion of native grasses, herbs, and shrubs. This project aims to sample habitats at various stages of restoration to see how insects and spiders respond to these...

Marit Oieroset - Research Physicist, Space Sciences Laboratory

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

Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental plasma process that converts magnetic energy into particle energy and plays an important role throughout space, laboratory, and astrophysical plasmas. At Earth, reconnection at the magnetopause provides a pathway for solar-wind particles and energy to enter the magnetosphere and is an important driver of...

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...

Daniel Okamoto - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Seaweeds (e.g., kelp, nori) are important primary producers, food sources, and essential fish habitat around the globe. While many species are resilient to climate change, many important species are also exhibiting declines in recent years and especially in response to marine heatwaves. We are conducting laboratory experiments and fieldwork focused...

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 Berkeley Institute of International Studies (IIS) and its collaborator, the human rights organization PAEMA (Preventing And Ending Mass Atrocities). The Berkeley lead researcher is Jessica Olney, IIS Executive Director. URAP students will contribute to PAEMA's Conflict News Monitoring Program, which 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

Phantom crane flies (Bittacomorpha clavipes) are one of the most mysterious fliers in the insect world because it has been suggested that they are able to use their legs and body to generate aerodynamic forces and still keep a tight aerial control. Our research can be applied to micro aerial...

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...

Rahul Parson - Professor , South and Southeast Asian Studies

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

The initiation of a liberalized economy and rise of right-wing nationalist politics has increased the precarity of vulnerable communities, minorities, women, and those seen as outsiders or immigrants. This project uses historical, archival, ethnographic, and literary critical approaches to vernacular cultures in order to make visible the new political...

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...

Angie Perone - Professor , Social Welfare

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

Founded in 2018, Village Movement California (VMC) is a statewide coalition of 50+ villages: local networks that connect people over 50 to the community, support and resources they need to live independently with dignity, choice and belonging. VMC represents more than 10,000 older Californians. Aging in America can be a...

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...

Amy Pickering - Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

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

We aim to develop methods for expanding wastewater surveillance to new pathogens, enabling population-scale monitoring of a wide variety of infectious diseases. We are developing a novel Cas9-based targeted sequencing method to enrich antibiotic resistant genes (ARGs) in wastewater alongside their genomic context to identify the species and...

Amy Pickering - Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

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

The Pickering Lab at UC Berkeley is working to bring safe drinking water to communities globally by disrupting pathogen transmission pathways in drinking water through in-line chlorination. In-line chlorination is a water treatment practice where low-cost, electricity-free devices automatically add chlorine into water for the disinfection...

Amy Pickering - Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

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

Contaminated water supplies in health facilities place patients at risk for antibiotic resistant infections, leading to poor health outcomes. Globally, more than 20% of health facilities lack even basic water services. To provide low-cost water treatment, the Pickering Lab has been developing a passive in-line chlorination technology, known...

Michael Polson - Staff Researcher, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Students will be working to support a project on the cannabis industry and the general work of the Cannabis Research Center in disseminating research and engaging the public. The project is a mixed method investigation of: 1) anti-competitive and monopolistic practices of cannabis investors and owner-operators; 2) protective...

James Porter - Professor, Rhetoric

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

Philosophy bibliographical research, collection, and digital scanning, with a special focus on the ancient Cynics and their afterlife, from the 4th century BC to the present...

James Porter - Professor, Rhetoric

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

I am editing a book of essays and correspondence by Rachel Bespaloff, who lived during WW I and II and wrote in French. The translated essays are nearing completion, but a good deal of work remains: * filling in bibliographic information based on notes I have already made * checking the translated...

Antje Postema - Lecturer, Slavic Languages and Literatures

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

On November 1, 2024, a railway station canopy in Novi Sad, Serbia collapsed, killing 16 people beneath it. In the days that followed, evidence pointed to widespread corruption as the cause of the disaster. What began as solemn vigils for the victims quickly transformed into the largest and most sustained...

Matthew Potts - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Soil is the largest terrestrial carbon reservoir, playing a major role in regulating carbon storage and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Within soil carbon management and climate change mitigation, agriculture is an important focus as a dominant human land-use and significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Integrated crop-livestock systems...

Matthew Potts - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Despite a surge in sustainability and financial data—from greenhouse gas inventories to climate and nature-related risk metrics—the challenge remains linking sustainability initiatives to financial outcomes. Data is abundant but siloed, limiting its ability to guide decision-making and creating missed opportunities for research, entrepreneurship, and capital deployment...

Ali Rahmati - Research Scientist, Space Sciences Laboratory

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

The Solar Energetic Particle (SEP) instrument onboard the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission is primarily designed to measure energetic electrons and protons. SEP, however, has also proven to be a versatile tool for "bonus science" beyond its intended scope. The focus of this project is on reinterpreting several...

Leigh Raiford - Professor, African American Studies

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

Since 1958, Bay Area educator, organizer and writer, Ms. Daphne Muse maintained a collection of correspondence that reflects the political and personal visions, voices, and struggles of activists, revolutionaries, political prisoners, writers, artists, entertainers, heads of state, and educators who profoundly shaped 20th-century Black lives and cultures. Before Ms...

Aruna Ranganathan - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This project examines how the design of AI-enabled tools shapes people’s work processes and experiences. For an upcoming experiment, we are developing a browser-based workspace in which participants will review task materials, interact with an integrated generative-AI assistant, move through stages of work, and turn in workplace...

Gautam Rao - Professor, Economics

Status: Open     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     

Interested in field experiments, primary data collection, and research management? Join a research team at UC Berkeley studying how to support student mental health at scale. Laura Chioda, Paul Gertler, and Gautam Rao are leading a randomized evaluation of a new approach to wellness support for students at UC Berkeley...