URAP

Eva Nogales - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

The large transcription coactivators TFIID and SAGA play important roles in the regulation of gene expression. Over a megadalton in size, each of these complexes contains a number of structural modules with distinct functionalities. Interestingly, they share one particular module that plays different roles and that contains a number of...

Eva Nogales - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

DNA methylation at CpG sites plays an essential role in maintaining genome stability and regulating gene expression and it is strictly monitored and controlled by a series of molecular machines. Defects in DNA methylation are frequently found in severe diseases, such as cancer and Alzheimer's. DNMT1(DNA methyltransferase 1) with...

Eva Nogales - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Accurate segregation of chromosomes during cell division is essential for maintaining proper cellular function and organismal health. Errors in chromosome segregation can result in apoptosis or an abnormal chromosome number, leading to conditions such as Down syndrome and Turner syndrome, exposing detrimental recessive mutations, and being associated with cancer. The...

Michael Nylan - Professor, History

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

This project seeks to examine many aspects of ancient history from new perspectives, including the environmental and the emotional...

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

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

School meal programs play a critical role in addressing childhood hunger, and initiatives to improve healthy eating often target school meal programs for improvement. This research explores how school districts address food access, health, educational, environmental, and social issues simultaneously through comprehensive school meal program reform. This approach to school...

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

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

California's housing crisis is well known, and scholars attribute this crisis largely to the inadequate supply of housing across multiple income levels. This study explores the relationship between local and state land use regulation and housing supply. We will examine approval processes in selected jurisdictions to understand...

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

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

UCB campus: Bees are responsible for pollination of many food crops and native plants. Moth larvae (caterpillars) are important herbivores of native and domesticated plants. Both bees and moths, therefore, are important indicators of ecosystem health. We are currently working to take high resolution photographs of of the hundreds of...

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

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

The Essig Museum is part of an ongoing large-scale collecting effort on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. We are collecting vast quantities of bizarre and fascinating arthropods, some of which will be new to science. The two main goals of the project are to document the biological diversity...

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

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

The Essig Museum, in collaboration with several other California institutions, is building a DNA barcode reference library for all species of insects in the state. This includes extracting DNA from identified museum specimens as well as collecting fresh specimens from around the state. The end goal is to develop a...

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

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

Natural History Museums are repositories for biodiversity research, documentation of the impacts of global change, and a resource for new and innovative science. Managing these collections requires expertise in many disparate disciplines such as library science, anatomy & morphology, taxonomy, and data management. The Essig Museum houses over 5 million specimens...

Mitsuo Oka - Research Scientist, Space Sciences Laboratory

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

NASA’s Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) mission consists of a fleet of four spacecraft orbiting Earth. Since its launch in 2015, it has significantly advanced our understanding of Earth's plasma environment, in particular the electron-scale physics of explosive energy-release phenomena. This summer, NASA began transitioning the fleet formation from the...

Daniel Okamoto - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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...

Todd Olson - Professor, Art History

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

The Spanish artist Jusepe Ribera interrogated the media of painting, drawing and etching in the vice-royalty of Naples. This publication project looks at the artist's In Ribera's work and its place in the Spanish Empire. His recourse to classical mythology as well as the depiction...

Todd Olson - Professor, Art History

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

Beato Antonio Baldinucci (Florence 1665 – Lazio 1717), son of the art historian to the Medici court, was a Jesuit missionary in Lazio, known for his penitential missions, involving carrying a cross, flagellation and bonfires of the vanities. During these internal missions, Baldinucci carried with him a copy of a painting...

Todd Olson - Professor, Art History

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

The French Huguenot ceramicist Bernard Palissy’s is famous for his casting of living specimens (amphibians and reptiles) for his plates. He was also a prolific writer, revealing his research in salt flats and his observation of fossils in the mountains. Palissy’s Discours admirable (1580) is a dialogue between Theory and...

Todd Olson - Professor, Art History

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

Simone Vouet was an emigré artist in Rome in the 1620s before he returned to France and became a major painter in Paris, most notably serving Anne d'Autriche, the mother of Louis III. This research project concerns the artist's production in Rome, most notably his execution...

David Oppenheimer - Professor, Law

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On 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. Much of our research, administration and leadership is done by Berkeley students, including URAP students. Our current projects include working groups on Sexual Harassment...

Victor Ortega Jimenez - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Marangoni effect is used by water striders (Veliidae) and rove beetles (Staphylinidae) to induce an ultrafast escape response against inter- or intra-specific predators. However, it is unclear if the surfactants secreted by these insects, that reduce surface tension of water, can also affect predator’s locomotion during the chasing...

Emily Ozer - Professor, Public Health

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

Youth should be meaningfully included and engaged in conversations about policies that directly affect them. Youth-Led Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is a social justice-focused approach for promoting social change and positive youth development in which youth conduct systematic research and actions to improve their schools and communities (Ozer...

Emily Ozer - Professor, Public Health

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

This project is conducting systematic review of the literature to describe the state of the youth participatory action research (YPAR) literature and synthesizing findings of the youth outcomes reported in these studies. YPAR is an approach that engages young people as researchers to study and address social problems within their...

Manisha Padi - Professor, Law

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

The Biden administration has prioritized a crackdown on "junk fees"; which proliferate across industries in modern times. The banking industry has been specifically targeted by federal regulators, resulting in a sea change in bank business models. This project studies bank fees and their effect on consumers using a hybrid qualitative...

Manisha Padi - Professor, Law

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

This project continues prior work investigating how local governments interact with home-based businesses in essential industries such as food production and childcare. Home businesses play a growing role in providing essential goods and services, as well as labor opportunities to workers with restrictions, including women with young children and...

Zachary Pardos - Professor, School of Information and Education

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

This project seeks to fill technical new researcher positions in the AskOski and OATutor research and development teams. The AskOski project (https://askoski.berkeley.edu/about) is a research and development effort lead by Professor Pardos to transfer the latest in big data and machine learning research to the domain of course...

Zachary Pardos - Professor, School of Information and Education

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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 given 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: Current Term Now Closed     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: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

PROJECT DESCRIPTION: 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 image preparation tools? Research apprentices associated with the URAP project Ancient Texts, Modern...

J. Theodore (Ted) Peña - Professor, Ancient Greek and Roman Studies

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

This project is concerned with the classification, quanitification, analysis and publication of the ca. 20 tons of ancient Roman pottery recovered in the Palatine East Excavations in downtown Rome. The material, which dates to the period ca. AD 50 – AD 450, comes from all over the Mediterranean world, and provides...

Jeffrey Pennington, Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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

The Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies serves as the focal point at the University of California at Berkeley for students and faculty who conduct research and teaching on the geographic region of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. ISEEES is working to organize and digitize its...

Saul Perlmutter - Professor, Physics

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

Our group has developed a new model for inferring the distances between Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) that is about twice as accurate as previous models. In order to determine the present day expansion rate, or the Hubble Constant, we need to determine a zero point calibration for the model...

Saul Perlmutter - Professor, Physics

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

Strong gravitational lenses are very rare occurrences and are a powerful tool in studying dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious entities that together account for 95% of the energy in the universe. The strong lensing team works on a range of projects with state-of-the-art computation/ML...

Saul Perlmutter - Professor, Physics

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

Type Ia supernovae are used to measure the rate at which our Universes is expanding, today and over the past 10 billion years. In the past we used Type Ia supernovae to discover that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. Now we have developed new techniques for making...

Saul Perlmutter - Professor, Physics

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

Sense & Sensibility & Science is a project which brings together researchers and educators to improve the way we use science to make decisions. Humans make decisions every day. As individuals, voters, and citizens of the world, the choices we make have the power to shape the world around us. The problem...

Angie Perone - Professor , Social Welfare

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

This project will involve two different mini-projects: (1) HOMES Survey:(LGBTQ+/SGL) Housing, Health, and Services for Older Adults. HOMES is a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project with LGBTQ+ / same-gender-loving older adults. It uses survey data from LGBTQ+ older adults and information from community partners from...

Angie Perone - Professor , Social Welfare

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

This community-engaged multi-faceted project applies an emerging theoretical and conceptual framework (equitable aging), which centers justice and power in understanding and examining aging programs, services, and policies. This project involves qualitative data collection (e.g., focus groups, interviews, ethnographic documents, virtual ethnography), qualitative data analysis, and dissemination. For one...

Angie Perone - Professor , Social Welfare

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

This project will provide opportunities for students with a strong foundation in quantitative research to help design a research project that collects survey data from CareYaya’s program participants. Students will also assist with survey data analysis and potentially dissemination. CareYaya is a technology-enabled caregiving platform that connects families who...

Alexandra Pfiffner - Professor, Linguistics

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

Implosives are a type of consonant found in 13% of the world’s languages (Maddieson, 1984) and are particularly widespread throughout the languages of sub-Saharan Africa. However, they remain extremely understudied in phonetics. The goal of this project is to work through fieldwork recordings from Summer 2024 with speakers of...

Professors Emeriti Philip Cowan and Kenneth Polse - Professors Emeriti, Psychology and School of Optometry

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

Background: Uncertainty about the ability obtain affordable, accessible and quality health care remains a serious problem for many Americans. The cost of health care continues to outpace inflation and many Americans, even those who have insurance are unable to afford health care. Therefore, issues related to affordability and access to...

Christine Philliou - Professor, History

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

The Pickering Lab at UC Berkeley is currently developing SOIL-SEQ, a hands-on education module for local high school classrooms designed to engage students in a crowdsourcing effort to provide data to better understand the spread of bacterial antibiotic resistance through the environment. We are using cutting-edge, portable...

Amy Pickering - Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

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

Soil-transmitted helminths (STH) cause a neglected tropical disease inextricably linked to poverty, inadequate sanitation, and unhygienic conditions. STH account for over five million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and infect around 1.5 billion people, representing the most prevalent parasitic infections worldwide. Classical microscopy-based surveillance strategies are suboptimal and...

Amy Pickering - Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

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

Wastewater-based surveillance (WBS) has become widespread in recent years for community-level surveillance of SARS-CoV-2, and it is currently being applied to many other diseases and public health issues. WBS presents an opportunity for studying and tracking antibiotic-resistant bacteria at the population level. We are working...

Amy Pickering - Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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...

Pedro Pinheiro-Chagas - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

The UCSF Memory and Aging Center (MAC) Co-pilot project is an innovative research initiative aimed at revolutionizing the diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases (NDD), such as Alzheimer's disease and Frontotemporal dementia, through the integration of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). This project is particularly significant due to the high prevalence...

Pedro Pinheiro-Chagas - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias are neurodegenerative diseases with numbers rapidly increasing and currently no cure. To accurately identify the earliest signs of clinical dementia, there is a critical need for sensitive, low-cost, and high-access cognitive markers in the preclinical phase. Novel cognitive markers can complement biomarker information...

Pedro Pinheiro-Chagas - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Semantic dementia (SD) presents as a unique neurodegenerative disorder with focal atrophy of the anterior temporal lobes (ATLs). It is comprised of a primarily left-lateralized language syndrome and a right-lateralized behavioral disorder. One current challenge in this disease is in accurately identifying the distant brain regions that are...

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

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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, overall, is a mixed method investigation of: 1) anti-competitive and monopolistic practices of cannabis investors and owner-operators; 2...

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

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

Accurately estimating unlicensed cultivation is crucial for assessing and designing interventions into the illicit market. This project aims to demonstrate the potential for accurate assessment of the amount and geography of unlicensed production in California with empirically-based data on cannabis cultivation, improved mapping tools, and robust ethnographic fieldwork. The...

Alison Post - Professor, Political Science

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

When do voters elect medical doctors for office? Scholars focused on symbolic and substantive representation typically concentrate on race, gender, religion, or some combination thereof. However, historically, political science scholars have been interested in occupation as a salient category, particularly lawyers. With the decline of the politician-lawyer in Congress...

Alison Post - Professor, Political Science

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

What are the main types of concerns that citizens bring to mayors and city councilors in Latin America? What sorts of incentives do public officials have to address these concerns? And how do these dynamics vary between cities of different sizes? In this project, we will investigate local-level politics...

Matthew Potts - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Project Overview: California faces dual challenges of ambitious climate commitments and a severe affordable housing crisis. This project aims to address these challenges by developing and scaling the use of Engineered Living Materials (ELM)—advanced biomaterials that integrate living cells with synthetic scaffolds. These materials can sense, respond to, and...