URAP

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: Current Term Now Closed     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: Current Term Now Closed     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: Current Term Now Closed     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: Current Term Now Closed     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: Current Term Now Closed     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...

Layla Kwong - Professor, Public Health

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

Climate change is increasing ambient temperatures around the globe. In some low- and middle-income countries, existing cooling technologies might be effective, but are difficult to access because of supply chain constraints or policies like tariffs. This project will conduct comparative case studies in four different countries to understand what...

Layla Kwong - Professor, Public Health

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

In large parts of Sub Saharan Africa, health facilities (e.g. hospitals and clinics) lack appropriate energy infrastructure. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where much of the continent's unelectrified are exposed to both climate and conflict pressures, the near-total absence of a central grid requires the health sector...

Marika Landau-Wells - Professor, Political Science

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

People are exposed to stories of all kinds in their daily lives, including appealing but false stories such as conspiracy theories. One way to understand the causal influence of stories on beliefs and behaviors is to use them as experimental treatments. The outcomes of these experiments can vary widely depending...

Marika Landau-Wells - Professor, Political Science

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     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. This project investigates how policy-makers in the U.S. and in other countries determine...

Marika Landau-Wells - Professor, Political Science

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

Neuroscientists have studied the brain's response to threatening stimuli since the earliest days of brain imaging. Yet there is no single catalogue of threat perception studies and their findings. Meta-analysis involves using data from many studies to characterize the collective state of knowledge in a field. This project seeks...

Marika Landau-Wells - Professor, Political Science

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

Social scientists often assign categorical values to text data in order to structure it (e.g., categorizing statements made by Congress members as pro- or anti-immigration). Traditionally, this coding has been done manually by humans who read and categorize the texts of interest. This method risks both systematic error (e.g...

Patricia Lang - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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...

Thibault Laplace - Research Scientist, Nuclear Engineering

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

Photon strength functions (PSFs) quantify the probability of γ‐ray emission and absorption in atomic nuclei as a function of energy, and they play a critical role in determining radiative neutron‐capture rates that drive the production of elements in stars. In particular, low‐lying resonances in PSFs can significantly...

Armando Lara-Millan - Professor, Sociology

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

Sometimes ideas about changing market signals can actually precede big changes in the economy, other times they can be too late, and sometimes those ideas can even cause changes. This project tracks ideas about three broad ongoing disruptions to the current global economic order. The first is that since 2011...

Armando Lara-Millan - Professor, Sociology

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

This project investigates the effects of market institutions on healthcare innovation and its consequences for inequality and wages. Specifically, the effect of the national medical code scheme on the ability of innovators to bring medical innovations (procedures, devices, diagnostics) to market. We will be assembling a large data set that...

Laurel Larsen - Professor, Geography

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

The Okavango Delta in Botswana is one of the world’s largest and most significant wetlands. Land-use changes in its headwaters and climate change are altering its patterns of inundation, with potential consequences for wildlife and human livelihoods. Due to the vastness and remoteness of the Okavango, however, its changing...

Laurel Larsen - Professor, Geography

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

California supplies water to nearly 40 million people, sustains the most productive agricultural region in the US, and supports a rich diversity of freshwater species. However, persistent drought, extreme floods, and widespread environmental degradation are exposing significant vulnerabilities in the state’s water management system. Furthermore, decisions over how water is...

Laurel Larsen - Professor, Geography

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

River flow forecasting is essential for planning reservoir operations, defense strategies against flooding, and fluvial ecosystems management plans. However, flow forecasting is a highly uncertain science. One of the biggest uncertainties lies in resolving the timescales over which water is stored in the subsurface and time lags between perturbations in...

Laurel Larsen - Professor, Geography

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

The Environmental Systems Dynamics Laboratory (ESDL) focuses on the interplay between biological, physical, and human aspects of the environment using a combination of physically-based and data-driven models. This internship aims to expand on our current work exploring the use of deep learning for environmental predictions. The Environmental Systems...

Adrian Lee - Professor, Physics

Status: Full- no new appr needed     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: Full- no new appr needed     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: Current Term Now Closed     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: Current Term Now Closed     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...

Gabriel Lenz - Professor, Political Science

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

US cities continue to experience a criminal justice nightmare with high rates of interpersonal violence, police violence, and incarceration. When did this nightmare start? Why did it start? In preliminary work, I've found that this nightmare appears to have begun in Jim Crow southern cities around 1900. This finding suggests...

Gabriel Lenz - Professor, Political Science

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

Unions are one of the few democratic institutions within the workplace. However, the institutional structure of unions can encourage or constrain democracy within unions. I am interested in investigating the inner workings of union locals by collecting data on union local constitutions and bylaws, and collective bargaining agreements. Additionally, unions...

Gabriel Lenz - Professor, Political Science

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

Research apprentices will assist with a project studying the racial identity and racial attitudes of white Democrats. This group has become markedly more liberal on race-related issues over the past decade, and scholars don’t know exactly why. This projects help to explain this shift by exploring how white survey...

Gabriel Lenz - Professor, Political Science

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

This project has two parts. Part 1 looks at how the news media shapes policy outcomes and whether disparities in coverage lead to policy inequity. Can we show convincing evidence that news coverage of pedestrian fatalities leads to a change in local transportation policy? Are certain communities more likely to...

Andrew Leong - Professor , English

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

Japanese and English-language literary columns in Japanese American newspapers played crucial roles in pre-World War II immigrant society, offering opportunities for readers and contributors to reflect upon their lives in the United States. This project includes retrieving, categorizing, and studying literary texts through resources such as the Hoji...

Andrew Leong - Professor , English

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

Tessaku_ Tessaku (鉄柵, or “Iron Fence”) is a Japanese-language literary journal that was published by incarcerees in the Tule Lake Segregation Center during World War II. It consists of nine issues, totaling 751 pages, running from March 1944 to July 1945, and includes poetry, fiction, and essays composed by...

David Levine - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

Most poor women face challenges with menstrual hygiene. The results are staying home during one's period (limiting work and school), fear of leaks, infections, and high cost of single-use products. We are running two trials in Tamil Nadu and in Karnataka on distribution of menstrual cups. It would be...

David Levine - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

We are developing a curriculum based on stories, games and engaging activities to teach about health in poor nations (wash hands with soap, etc...

David Levine - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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. ChatGPT, GPT4 and their peers should be able to provide high-quality support, especially if trained on the local clinical guidelines (retrieval augmented generation, RAG...

David Levine - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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: Current Term Now Closed     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...

Jennifer Lewis - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

The plant pathogen Pseudomonas syringae causes disease in a large number of different plant species. Virulence is primarily achieved by the type III secretion system, which secretes and translocates effector proteins into the plant. Many of these effector proteins are believed to suppress host defense signaling. However recognition of these...

Lu Liang - Professor, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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...

Lu Liang - Professor, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning

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

Understanding urban climate dynamics, such as the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, requires comprehensive datasets on urban morphology and land cover. Local Climate Zones (LCZs) provide a standardized framework for classifying urban and rural areas based on their physical and surface properties. A global LCZ database is essential for analyzing...

Meng C. Lin - Professor, Optometry

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

Dry eye disease (DED) is pervasive with some reports estimating over 16 million adults diagnosed with DED in the United States. It has been well documented that race, sex, systemic conditions, medications, and contact lens use are among the risk factors for DED. There are numerous dry eye questionnaires and...

Meng C. Lin - Professor, Optometry

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

This research investigates the fascinating impact of aging on the morphology of the Meibomian gland (MG), which plays a pivotal role in Ocular Surface Disease. Traditionally, clinicians have employed subjective methods to identify and grade MG features such as atrophy, tortuosity, length, width, and ghosting. At the exciting crossroads of...

Meng C. Lin - Professor, Optometry

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

Scleral lenses, unlike standard contact lenses, are large-diameter rigid lenses that rest on the sclera (white part of the eye) and create a tear-filled reservoir to hydrate the anterior ocular surface. They are primarily recommended for patients with corneal irregularities and dry eye diseases due to their capability...

Fenyong Liu - Professor, Public Health

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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...

Juan Liu - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Lateral line sensory system, or lateral line organ, or simply the lateral line, is a system of sensory organs found in fish and some tetrapods (four-legged vertebrates). The lateral line enables those vertebrates to detect and perceive the hydrodynamic and physical environment they inhabit including movement, vibration, and pressure...

Juan Liu - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Scientific illustration is art in the service of science by drawing, painting, or rendering images of scientific subjects to accurately inform and communicate sciences. Research in fossil fishes (paleoichthyology) is at the junction of paleontology and ichthyology, and therefore, possesses characteristics of both —-- the incomplete nature of fossil preservations and...

Juan Liu - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Our study aims to explore the intricate details of mammalian hearing, with a specific emphasis on the function and evolution of the middle ear, with comparative anatomy with fish hearing apparatus. This critical aspect of auditory anatomy plays a pivotal role in the way mammals perceive and interpret sound. By...

Juan Liu - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Catfishes (Siluriformes) are remarkable among hearing specialist fishes in their possession of the Weberian apparatus, a conductive multi-ossicle chain linking the inner ear and swim bladder that is analogous to the middle ear ossicles of the mammalian tetrapods. Work with laboratory animals has produced considerable insight into the role...

John Liu - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common primary brain cancer. Despite decades of research to better treat this cancer, most patients unfortunately die within 2 years of diagnosis. Surgery followed by radiation therapy and chemotherapy comprise the standard of care for patients with GBM, but resistant to treatment poses a major...

Brooke Lober - Lecturer, Gender and Women's Studies

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

This project seeks to offer both a critique of feminist historiography and an alternate genealogy for Jewish feminisms in the late 20th century U.S., revealing both the presence and the historical marginalization of Jewish feminist anti-Zionists. To do this, the work offers a “history of the present” by exploring...

Gabriel Loeb - Professor, Medicine, UCSF

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

I am a scientist and physician investigating molecular mechanisms underlying human disease--with a particular focus on kidney disease. My laboratory integrates computational approaches with human genetics and advanced experimental models to discover genetic mechanisms of disease. We have a particular interest in understanding the molecular basis of kidney disease...

Gabriel Loeb - Professor, Medicine, UCSF

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

I am a scientist and physician with a broad interest in mechanisms underlying human disease. Our laboratory studies genetic mechanisms underlying kidney disease and develops approaches to discover novel disease mechanisms that are broadly applicable to many human diseases. Many of the genetic variants (changes in the genome) which contribute...