URAP

Kent Lightfoot - Professor, Anthropology

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

This project is an opportunity for URAP students to participate in the lab-based analysis of soils excavated from the Estate Little Princess, a sugar plantation that was active on St. Croix (US Virgin Islands) from 1749 through the 1940s. Over the course of the semester students will be trained...

Kent Lightfoot - Professor, Anthropology

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

Researchers in the California Archaeology Laboratory are continuing a long-term study investigating land stewardship practices of Native Californian peoples. The study involves collecting samples of archaeological biological materials (shell, animal, and plant remains) from a number of sites up to 6000 years old on the Central California Coast and...

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

Our goals at the Clinical Research Center of the Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry and Vision Science are to explore new models and strategies for the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of ocular diseases through patient-based clinical studies/trials and translational research. We are committed to advancing the understanding of...

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

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...

Lúcia Lohmann, University and Jepson Herbaria

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

Herbaria are museums that house preserved plant collections for scientific purposes. For centuries, plant specimens have been collected from various locations, labeled with essential data, and stored for use by scientists and researchers worldwide. Properly curated plant specimens can last indefinitely, providing data for generations of scholars to study taxonomy...

Lúcia Lohmann, University and Jepson Herbaria

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

The spirit collection in the University and Jepson Herbaria houses thousands of plant and algae specimens preserved in alcohol. This preservation method is essential for material that cannot be dried or pressed, as it retains their three-dimensional structure and allows for detailed examination without the distortion or shrinkage that...

Cynthia Looy - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

At present, flowering plants (angiosperms) represent ~90% of the land plant species and are dominant in most global biomes. However, the first flowering plant is known from the fossil record around 135 million years ago (mya) during the Early Cretaceous, much more recent compared to the gymnosperms, which first appeared...

Cynthia Looy - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

In many ways, the Earth of the Permian period (298.9-251.9 million years ago) would have looked alien to a modern observer: the Earth’s surface was divided between the supercontinent Pangea and the superocean Panthalassa, strange animals neither mammal nor dinosaur dominated terrestrial faunas, and no flower would bloom for more...

Cynthia Looy - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Pollinators are essential components of a healthy ecosystem and provide vital benefits to both plants and animals. The student-run pollinator garden around the Valley Life Science Building (VLSB) supports native arthropods (e.g. insects and spiders) and other wildlife and is an environmental education resource for students. We plan to...

Cynthia Looy - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Plants are adapted to the physical conditions in their environments, including temperature, precipitation, atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and light level. In cooler and drier habitats, leaves tend to be smaller with condensed venation and toothed margins. While under warmer and wetter conditions, leaves tend to be larger, have ‘drip tips’, and...

Kristina Lovato - Professor, Social Welfare

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

U.S. immigration policies have become increasingly restrictive, exacerbating fears among Latinx immigrant youth and families at risk of deportation and forced family separation. Legal activity related to immigration policy and practice increased during the pandemic and provided the Trump administration with a pretext for tightening already stringent immigration policies. The...

Kristina Lovato - Professor, Social Welfare

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

Aa majority of the data on Latino family and youth outcomes in the past few decades has, with minor exceptions, provided an undifferentiated analysis of Latino populations that often fail to account for historical incorporation and additional crucial identities such as race, ethnicity, phenotype, socioeconomic status, and generation in the...

Jessica Lu - Professor, Astronomy

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

My research group studies black holes in the Milky Way in two ways: (1) we search for stellar-mass black holes using gravitational microlensing and (2) we study the environment around the supermassive. black hole at the Galactic Center. Interested undergraduates may work in either of these areas. Possible projects...

Jessica Lu - Professor, Astronomy

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

The Moving Universe Lab helps design and build the astronomical instruments needed to find and study black holes, star cluster, and galactic centers. We work on adaptive optics development projects on small and large ground-based telescopes (e.g. Keck Observatory). Adaptive optics systems correct for the blurring effects of the...

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

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Ancient Egyptian coffins are inscribed with spells and images which stand in for spells. All function together as a machine to resurrect the deceased and to guide them safely through the next world. Given this function, it is perhaps surprising that the texts from coffins are usually published completely divorced...

Kam-Biu Luk - Professor, Physics

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

We are active in a number of different areas of data analysis, using data from the DUNE near and far detector prototypes, using data from the T2K experiment, and with simulation studies in planning for the upcoming DUNE experiment. Potential analysis work includes tasks focused on the use of machine...

Kristin Luker - Professor, Law, Sociology

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

This project is part of an forthcoming book on how contraception and abortion, common parts of American family life throughout much of American history, came to be regulated in the late 19th century, became liberalized a century later, and are now the focus of intense political controversy. That regulation has...

Colleen Lye - Professor, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues

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

This project involves the production of a series of short educational videos on Professor Emeritus Ling-chi Wang and his contributions to Asian American civil rights history since the 1960s. The video topics are: the link between campus and community; immigrant advocacy and language rights; varieties of anti-Asian bias...

Qihui Lyu - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: Off Campus

This project aims to improve metal artifacts in Computed Tomography (CT) images. In the presence of highly attenuating objects such as dental fillings, spinal screws/rods, hip prostheses, and gold fiducial markers, CT images are often corrupted by streak artifacts, making these images non-diagnostic and impacting the accuracy of...

Dengke Ma - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Genome evolution has enabled organisms to live in and adapt to nearly every ecological niche on Earth. Humans live in an oxygen-rich ecosystem and human tissues are susceptible to deprivation of oxygen (hypoxia) under pathological conditions, including ischemic stroke and heart attack. Many organisms, from anaerobic bacteria to hibernating...

Dengke Ma - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

The nematode C. elegans can be frozen alive, suspend life and revive later virtually any long after freezing, unlike many other multicellular organisms, including flies, fish, mice and humans. How C. elegans achieves this feat remains a fascinating unsolved mystery. This project will use our newly established reporters and assays...

Eric Y. Ma - Professor, Physics

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

Highly sensitive microwave (MW) reflectometry, like those used in Microwave Impedance Microscopy for probing local electronic properties in solids (see e.g. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/350/6260/538), have been built with bulky, expensive, highly specialized, mostly manually controlled components so far. This project aims to explore the possibility of using all-digital...

Eric Y. Ma - Professor, Physics

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

The future of work is being shaped by a combination of extended reality, robotics and real-time virtualization -- the “digital twins” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_twin). In this project you will design and build the digital twin of a modern Physics/EE lab that provides nearly real-time info on...

Eric Y. Ma - Professor, Physics

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

Having a virtual assistant who has read and internalized decades of scientific literature is a dream that may come true in the next decade. Such an assistant will significantly speed up scientific discovery and understanding by human scientists, and eventually become agents of new knowledge itself. To make this a...

Lisa Maher - Professor, Anthropology

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

About 10,000 years ago in Southwest Asia farming communities began to settle in large villages and produce their own food; forever changing the social and physical landscape of this region. However, the emergence of social complexity and the dramatic social and economic changes that led to the origins of agriculture...

Lisa Maher - Professor, Anthropology

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

This Spring, work with state-of-the-art lab equipment and learn how to examine soils to find signs of past human environmental impacts. Over the course of the semester, students will be trained in the basic tenants of archaeology, geology, and geoarchaeology through the lab-based analyses of soils...

Simo Makiharju - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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: Current Term Now Closed     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 2024 Fall semester. You will find below the list of projects open for URAP positions. PLEASE state/rank which projects you would like to work on in your application. Expectations: - Attend one 1...

Ulrike Malmendier - Professor, Economics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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...

Michael Manga - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

Status: Full- no new appr needed     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...

Michael Manga - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

Long-Valley caldera is an active magmatic system in California. The goal of this project is to explore seismic attenuation changes with ambient noise seismic interferometry to characterize subsurface hydrothermal fluid/magma movement and surface snow loading deformation process. This project will use over 20-years of seismic data to...

Michael Manga - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

Olivine-rich rocks, such as those from the mantle, react with water to form serpentine, other minerals, and release hydrogen. There is a large volume change from this reaction. Stresses from volume changes can create cracks which enable water to enter the rock. This project seeks to unravel the history...

Michael Manga - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

Mono Lake hosts some of the youngest volcanoes in California and one of them is actively sinking into the lake. The goal of this project is to quantify active volcanic deformation in Mono Lake and reveal the mechanisms that are driving it. This project will use InSAR, LiDAR, and geologic...

Angela Marino - Professor, Latinx Research Center

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     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 team of other students to plan, record, edit, and publish research materials on social justice and democracy in the American...

Robin Marsh - Senior Researcher, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues

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

This project will address the overall question: how can regional, national and local policies, practices and transdisciplinary collaboration facilitate inclusive participation in a rural revitalization process based on just and sustainable agriculture? With the median age of farmers in the mid-to-late 50s and serious issues of rural depopulation...

Robin Marsh - Senior Researcher, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues

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

We are generating quantitative and qualitative data from several research instruments to understand the multiple impacts of women-led organic vegetable gardening in Western Uganda. These instruments include 24 hour recall and food security surveys, general demographics, gardening and welfare questionnaires, and narrative stories. This fall semester we will complete...

Charles Marshall - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

The colonization of land by plants and animals from the oceans was pivotal in our planet’s history, leading to major climate change and the evolution of the great forests, dinosaurs, and our own species. However, the first terrestrial and freshwater aquatic ecosystems are poorly understood due to a spotty fossil...

Charles Marshall - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

This research seeks to understand the factors responsible for species dispersal. Specifically, we are interested in dispersals during an event known as the Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI). GABI was a large-scale exchange of taxa between North and South America via the emergence of the Isthmus of Panama. These...

Megan Martik - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

The huge diversity of animal lifeforms that occupy virtually every ecological niche on our planet are all produced through the transformation of a single-celled zygote to a multicellular, fully functional organism via the processes encompassed by embryogenesis. It is through tweaks and changes to these developmental mechanisms that new...

Megan Martik - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

The evolution of vertebrates is intimately linked to the advent of the neural crest, a migratory and multipotent cell population that gives rise to many defining vertebrate characteristics, such as the jaw and peripheral gangilia. Where the neural crest arise along the body axis during developmement has great impacts on...

Megan Martik - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

The neural crest (NC) is a transient stem cell population that emerges during early vertebrate embryogenesis. Characterized by its migratory behavior and multipotency, the NC gives rise to diverse cell types and tissue derivatives including elements of the peripheral nervous system, the craniofacial skeleton, and the cardiovascular system. The NC...