URAP

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

1) 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...

Victor Ortega Jimenez - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     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...

Victor Ortega Jimenez - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

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

Victor Ortega Jimenez - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Helicopters seeds (Samaras) are remarkable for their aerodynamic capabilities with insects wings. We Investigate the aerodynamics and kinematics of samaras in a vertical wind tunnel. The goal of this project is to understand the unsteady mechanisms they have to fly on unsteady flow conditions...

Victor Ortega Jimenez - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Flying predator and their prey are commonly challenged to interact under unstable flow conditions. However, the effects produced by non-steady flows on predator-prey relationships, which demand acute aerial control and maneuvering, remain unclear. Particularly, because aerial predators are generally larger than preys, which can bias the locomotory effects...

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...

Emily Ozer - Professor, Public Health

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

The SFUSD-UC Berkeley RPP aims to: 1) Integrate youth voice and Youth-Led Participatory Action Research into school/district decision-making processes. YPAR is an innovative approach for promoting social change and positive youth development in which youth conduct systematic research and actions to improve their schools and communities...

Emily Ozer - Professor, Public Health

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

The Ozer lab works on multiple projects focused on community-engaged and participatory research approaches, such as: Research-practice partnerships (RPP); Community-based participatory research (CBPR); Youth-led participatory action research (YPAR). YPAR is an innovative approach for promoting social change and positive youth development in which youth conduct systematic...

Christian Paiz - Professor, Ethnic Studies

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

The University of California, Berkeley played a critical role in the development of Chicanx Studies and in the student, community, and labor activism that fostered the field’s expansion in the mid-to-late twentieth century. This apprenticeship project asks: what goals, contexts, and visions inspired early Chicano/a scholars at...

Christian Paiz - Professor, Ethnic Studies

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

This apprenticeship focuses on farmworker history in the Coachella Valley, a small agricultural desert in Southern California. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Coachella Valley played a critical role in the development, successes, and challenges of the United Farm Worker (UFW) movement, one of the most important agricultural labor movements...

Zachary Pardos - Professor, Education

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

The AskOski project (https://askoski.berkeley.edu/about) is a research and development effort led by Professor Pardos to transfer the latest in big data and machine learning research to the domain of course guidance in higher ed. The recommender system is live in-production at Berkeley, with partial deployments at several...

Zachary Pardos - Professor, Education

Status: 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 on a continuous assessment of their mastery of a skill. At Berkeley, the ALEKS system is used...

Rahul Parson - Professor , South and Southeast Asian Studies

Status: 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: Current Term Now Closed     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 - Executive Director, 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...

Fernando Perez - Professor, Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment

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

GeoJupyter is an open community which aims to enable more people to confidently engage with geospatial data through open source tools. Our flagship project is JupyterGIS, a Geospatial Information System (GIS) environment native to the browser and implemented as a JupyterLab extension. Other ongoing efforts include: a Jupyter extension enabling...

Rebecca Perlman - Professor, Political Science

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

There is growing concern about the so-called “revolving door” between regulatory agencies and the firms they are charged with regulating. However, until recently, it was impossible to comprehensively document this phenomenon, due to the difficulty of linking individual bureaucrats with their subsequent work trajectories at scale. In this project...

Saul Perlmutter - Professor, Physics

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

Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) are critical for cosmology. They were first used to discover the fact that the expansion of the universe is speeding up and are now being used to measure the current rate of expansion. We’re in a time with a huge influx of data with JWST...

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 cutting-edge AI/ML techniques. We...

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

It has been thought that the accelerated expansion of our universe is caused by an unknown "dark energy" which has a constant energy density. However, there are currently hints that dark energy is actually evolving over time. If this were true, there would be implications on fundamental physics and potentially...

Angie Perone - Professor , Social Welfare

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

This multi-faceted project applies an emerging theoretical and conceptual framework (equitable aging), which centers justice and power in understanding and examining aging-related programs, services, and policies. It also draws from community-engaged research in aging and older adults. Students will learn about equitable aging, community-engaged research, and...

Angie Perone - Professor , Social Welfare

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

Healthcare claims (and prior authorizations) are increasingly being denied by healthcare insurance companies--many of whom are using new AI tools to categorically issue denials. Appealing insurance denials is costly in terms of time and money for consumers and clinicians and contributes to clinician workload and burnout. This community-engaged...

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: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

The Pickering Lab at UC Berkeley is currently conducting 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: Check back for status     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: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

The Pickering Lab is looking for a URAP student interested in working on an in-line chlorination project in Honduras. The project evaluates the Cova Circuit Rider model as an effective model for scaling up access to inline chlorinated water in Central America. Cova, a non-profit organization, has developed...

Amy Pickering - Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Status: Check back for status     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...

Sam Pimentel - Professor, Statistics

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Estimating the causal effects of a treatment (compared to a control condition) is an important task in the social and medical sciences. However, unless the treatment was assigned randomly to subjects it can be difficult to establish whether apparent effects are due to treatment or due to unmeasured confounding variables...

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...

Victoria Plaut - Professor, Law

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

Despite the enormous impact of the Venture Capital (“VC”) industry—it has helped anoint the world’s four most valuable companies—there is effectively no legal backstop that ensures non-dominant groups (e.g., women and Black people) have an equal opportunity to share in its wealth creation and innovation. Furthermore, while...

Victoria Plaut - Professor, Law

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

This project seeks to uncover the social psychological underpinnings of the debate around inclusion policies and free speech. As college campuses nationwide have instituted policies designed to promote inclusion (e.g., safe spaces, trigger warnings, hate speech codes, and pronoun usage policies), furor and debate have ignited. On the one hand...

Victoria Plaut - Professor, Law

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

This study will examine judicial decision making at summary judgment (a particular phase of trial) in race and gender-based employment discrimination cases. RAs will assist with legal research and qualitatively code judicial opinions. RAs will gain experience using LexisNexis and Westlaw legal research databases (which are routinely used in...

Victoria Plaut - Professor, Law

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

This series of projects examines equity, diversity, and inclusion across various institutional domains (e.g., tech, education, etc.). Some areas of interest include understanding how diversity is perceived by both dominant and non-dominant groups and how this affects belonging, and how people interact with policies that may or may not...

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 is a mixed method investigation of: 1) anti-competitive and monopolistic practices of cannabis investors and owner-operators; 2) protective...

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

Status: Full- no new appr needed     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: Full- no new appr needed     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...

Antje Postema - Lecturer, Slavic Languages and Literatures

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

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

Matthew Potts - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

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

Matthew Potts - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

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

Matthew Potts - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Faced with ever-increasing anthropogenic pressures, including land use change and climate change, today’s biodiversity is in crisis. Anthropogenically induced species extinction rates have become high enough to prompt researchers to dub this phenomenon the “Sixth Great Extinction”. Meanwhile, emerging voluntary biodiversity markets, in parallel to voluntary carbon markets, hold...

Matthew Potts - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

PROJECT OVERVIEW Digital infrastructures—such as cryptocurrency mining, AI data centers, and renewed metal mining—are reshaping landscapes, ecosystems, and communities worldwide. This project is part of the Digital Ecologies Research Group, an interdisciplinary initiative examining the socio-environmental health impacts of digital transformations across El Salvador, the Pacific Northwest...

Mary Power - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

The Angelo Coast Range Reserve is a UC Berkeley Natural Reserve System site in Mendocino County, on the South Fork of the Eel River. Angelo is the site of numerous historical and current UC Berkeley research studies, and collections by UC Berkeley Natural History museums. The proposed research project is...

Elizabeth Purdom - Professor, Statistics

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

This project involves developing statistical methodologies to analyze data from single-cell sequencing of individual patients. Single-cell sequencing of mRNA measures the amount of mRNA of each gene found in individual cells. It measures the diversity of mRNA within cells, and when performed on many individuals can allow us...