URAP

Babak Javid - Professor, Medicine/Experimentsl Medicine

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

We have shown (in unpublished data) that antibodies specific for Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), complexed to live Mtb, can stimulate NLRP3 inflammasomes -- a multi-protein complex that is involved in pro-inflammatory signaling. However, the precise molecular mechanisms are not known. In this URAP project, the student will use latex-beads...

Babak Javid - Professor, Medicine/Experimentsl Medicine

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

Almost everything known about bacterial protein synthesis is from the study of "canonical" mRNAs in E. coli and other model organisms. However, many bacteria translate non-canonical mRNAs. A quarter of mRNAs in mycobacteria lack 5' UTRs -- but the "rules" governing leaderless translation are not fully understood. This project will...

Amin Jazaeri - Director of Instructional Support, Mechanical Engineering

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

Students will design experiments that can be controlled remotely through the internet...

Sheri Johnson - Professor, Psychology

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

This project explores how specific dietary interventions—time-restricted eating and the Mediterranean diet—impact symptoms and quality of life in individuals with bipolar disorder. By examining the relationship between eating patterns and mood regulation, the study aims to identify potential lifestyle-based approaches to improve mental health outcomes...

Sheri Johnson - Professor, Psychology

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

The goal of this study is to consider cognitive influences on misophonia...

Sheri Johnson - Professor, Psychology

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

Emotional dysregulation is an underlying risk factor for many mental health disorders. Two common ways it shows up in people’s lives are rumination and emotion-related impulsivity, which are linked to deficits in cognitive control. The Neurobehavioral Affective Control Training (N-ACT) project focuses on testing a novel cognitive training...

Sheri Johnson - Professor, Psychology

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

This project explores how emotion influences reasoning in the context of bipolar disorder. By examining the effect of emotion on reasoning, we aim to better understand how individuals develop beliefs often associated with the disorder...

Keith Johnson - Professor, Linguistics

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

This project aims to document conversational speech of ordinary people of all ages and backgrounds who grew up in Oakland. Our main interest is in how people pronounce their words - is there an "Oakland accent" but the recordings are also social records from people spanning a wide range of age...

Christopher Jones - Director, California Institute of Energy and Environment

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

The purpose of this project is to collect, analyze and visualize data on energy, transportation, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, GHG drivers, household carbon footprints, climate action planning, and equity into a single, data-driven climate action portal for all California cities and communities. Project website: https://climateplans.org...

Amy Joy - Professor, Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology

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

This project seeks 3 or 4 student to continue my research to update and add current controversial topics for my NST 24 undergraduate class: Eating Green: The science behind the grassroots food movement. This Part 3 project will seek new topics as well as creative ideas to enhance the learning...

Amy Joy - Professor, Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology

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

This project researches current topics in nutrition and health for my undergraduate class ("Eating Green: The science behind the grassroots food movement"). My class is a small-group class that uses a discussion format to cover a range of controversial questions (eg. Are organic foods better?). Currently teaching this class...

Rosemary Joyce - Professor, Anthropology

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

Archaeology of Honduras 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...

Yehuda Kalay - Professor, Architecture

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

High-rise buildings pose unique fire-safety challenges due to high occupancy rate and difficult evacuation conditions. In 2023, San Francisco adopted a Fire Code amendment requiring full sprinkler retrofits in all residential high-rise buildings built before 1975, affecting 146 buildings, home to approximately 15,000 residents. While sprinklers are...

Jerome Karabel - Professor, Sociology

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

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

Galateia Kazakia - Professor, UC San Francisco, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

Our research group focuses on advanced imaging techniques for the study of musculoskeletal structure and function (for details please see: http://www.radiology.ucsf.edu/research/kazakia). For this project, we plan to use two recently developed imaging tools to investigate the structure and composition of bone. State-of-the-art micro computed...

Galateia Kazakia - Professor, UC San Francisco, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

Our research group focuses on advanced imaging techniques for the study of musculoskeletal structure and function (for details please see: http://www.radiology.ucsf.edu/research/kazakia). For this project, we will be performing advanced image processing and analysis on high resolution computed tomography (CT) images of the skeleton. These images are being...

Shreeharsh Kelkar - Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Field (ISF)

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

The term "AI" or "artificial intelligence" is now regularly splashed across news articles and op-eds; most people have some, if vague, idea of what AI means. But the term today does not mean what it used to mean: in the last two decades, the crop of technologies we now...

Shreeharsh Kelkar - Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Field (ISF)

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

For many ordinary people, the term "Cambridge Analytica"--even if they are not sure exactly what the controversy is about--brings forth some association with the topics of election interference, psychological manipulation, illicit hacking, Russian disinformation, and Facebook. The truth is that it had very little to do with any...

Shreeharsh Kelkar - Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Field (ISF)

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

Political scientists have noticed a large contemporary trend in the US where high-income college-educated people tend to vote Democratic rather than Republican, a reversal of earlier patterns; they have labeled this as "education polarization". Education polarization is best illustrated through the case of Prop 22 in California. In...

Shreeharsh Kelkar - Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Field (ISF)

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

In October 2012, the Harvard Business Review declared “data scientist” to be the “sexiest job of the 21st century.” Part of a "Spotlight package" on the power of "big data" and its potential to change organizations and management, the articles in the issue collectively argued that with the growth of...

Waqas Khalid - Associate Scientist, QB3

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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...

Samiha Khalil - Professor, Rhetoric

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

This project will trace the development of "alienation" as a legal, philosophical, and religious concept. It will also draw a map of how the concept is taken up in twentieth-century Hegelian and Marxist traditions to indicate a deep sense of estrangement in the modern capitalist world. The project will...

Asir Intisar Khan - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

Modern AI and data-intensive technologies demand faster, smaller, and far more energy-efficient electronic devices. However, as today’s electronics continue to shrink, traditional materials, such as metals, are approaching fundamental limits. When metals become thin, their electrical resistivity increases sharply due to electron scattering at their surfaces. This leads...

Asir Intisar Khan - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

Data-centric applications face growing latency and energy challenges due to the separation of logic and memory components in traditional computing architecture. Neuro-inspired computing, modeled on the brain’s energy-efficient neural networks, offers a promising solution by reducing off-chip memory access. However, existing memory technologies struggle to achieve...

Asir Intisar Khan - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

The Kidd Lab studies learning and belief formation using a combination of computational and behavioral methods. In our behavioral experiments, we measure how humans look, explore, play, and learn starting in infancy and continuing throughout childhood. We use eye-trackers to measure visual fixations, touchscreens to study exploration in kid...

Andrew Kim - Professor, Anthropology

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

Biotechnological innovations have forced us to reconsider the extent to which our histories and environments shape our health and biology, which has provided new perspectives on old debates from the eugenics movement such as ideas about "biological and genetic superiority", the conceptual relevance of “biological race", and threats of “degeneration...

Andrew Kim - Professor, Anthropology

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

This project will examine the roles of early life stress and lifecourse trauma exposure on long COVID outcomes. Long COVID is a cluster of symptoms that is known to result from a cascade of pathophysiological mechanisms that persist beyond the acute stage of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Growing research suggests...

Andrew Kim - Professor, Anthropology

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

Israel’s genocide in Gaza has killed 7.9% of the population, and thousands of Palestinians have faced myriad forms of violence and imminent threats to life, including physical injuries from ballistics, home demolitions, and torture. These highly traumatic conditions pose severe physical and psychological threats to Palestinians and may have reverberating...

Michael Kiparsky - Director, Wheeler Water Institute, Center for Law, Energy and the Environment

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

Our team has co-developed a novel incentive structure that can encourage landowners to infiltrate water into the ground. We hope to work with a URAP student to advance the functionality of an existing cost-benefit analysis (CBA) tool that helps evaluate the potential for such projects. The ultimate outcome...

Michael Kiparsky - Director, Wheeler Water Institute, Center for Law, Energy and the Environment

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

Innovation is sorely needed in water resources – water is managed under technological and legal systems that have developed too slowly to respond to changes such as increasing population, land use change, and developments in ecological understanding. Water resources are governed by a multitude of factors, including legal, regulatory, economic, hydrologic...

Alexa Koenig - Co-Faculty Director, Human Rights Center

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

Thank you for your interest in the Investigations Lab. Please complete the Google form and this application [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScQDG8jqX1YE2GWvBpl-a9LBj-32VOZV8fJlaMQZzaE_sGAIA/viewform?usp=dialog]. You will not be considered unless you have completed both the URAP application and the supplemental questionnaire. The HRC Lab is...

Yury Kolomensky - Professor, Physics

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

Matt Kondolf - Professor, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning

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

Conservation groups estimate that half of the 5,000+ riparian meadows in the Sierra Nevada have become “degraded”, or converted from wet to dry meadows as indicated by the dominance of non-meadow vegetation species (e.g. lodgepole pines or sagebrush). Meadows cover less than 1% of Sierran forests, but have an...

Matt Kondolf - Professor, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning

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

In wet meadows of the Sierra Nevada, seasonal productivity of hydrophytic species depends on near-surface groundwater to sustain photosynthesis through the region’s summer drought. Seasonal meteorological patterns of energy and water (e.g. temperature, light availability, groundwater levels and humidity) drive plant phenology, the cycles of plant growth, reproduction and...

Michelle Koo - Staff Curator, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

Microbiomes change over time, often with important functional consequences for their hosts. But the ecological drivers of microbiome succession are poorly understood. We are studying the role that microbial interactions play in this process by examining the constituents of the digestive microbiome of the insectivorous California pitcher plant (Darlingtonia californica...

Britt Koskella - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Phage, viruses that infect and kill bacteria, are ubiquitous, yet their impacts on beneficial bacteria that colonize plants are not well understood. Phage are abundant in the soil and therefore soil-dwelling bacteria must hone defenses against phage in order to survive. Likewise, phage must hone their capacity to infect...

Britt Koskella - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

We are building a new system (fire blight of pear trees) to better understand how bacteriophage viruses might impact the ability of a bacterial pathogen (Erwinia amylovora) to colonize and infect pear trees. We are tracking bacteria-phage interactions through time by isolating individual phages from each of 25 diseased...

Britt Koskella - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

In natural systems, microorganisms interact with myriad other microbial populations which influence their evolution and ecology. When associated with a eukaryotic host, these complex microbial communities (known as microbiomes) also interact with and impact their host’s ecology and evolution, nutrient acquisition, and pathogen susceptibility. Despite the microbiome's vast importance on...

Laura Kray - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This project examines behavior, beliefs, and attitudes relevant to gender differences in career attainment. Using a variety of methods, including experimental studies, correlational studies, and archival analyses, this project seeks to understand organizational barriers limiting gender equality in compensation and advancement and to identify interventions aimed at mitigating them. Some...

Laura Kray - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This project examines how power differently impacts men and women's experiences of the workplace. Power leads people to experience a number of psychological changes, however these changes may manifest differently in men and women. To investigate this question, we will run correlational studies, social science experiments, and interviews...

Laura Kray - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

In this project, we are interested in how people experience question and answer periods after talks about research. The research in this project is centered around how do people judge the questions other people ask and how does that make them in turn feel. For our next study, we would...

Christopher Kutz - Professor, Legal Studies

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

We are looking for an energetic undergraduate passionate about moral, political, and legal philosophy who can help with the intellectual life of the Kadish Center. You'll be involved in helping to choose events and speakers, enagaging in their work, and helping to foster a broader audience among undergraduates in particular...

Layla Kwong - Professor, Public Health

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

Global warming is increasing ambient temperatures, negatively impacting pregnancy outcomes, as well as a female and male fertility - but to what degree? And what are the mechanisms of effect? We have started integrating extensive research on heat and reproduction from animals with the more limited on humans to answer these...