URAP

Steven Piantadosi - Professor, Psychology

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

We are currently working on a series of studies that use behavioral methods to research mathematical development in children. These studies investigate: 1) the relationship between early mathematics and attention; and 2) the development of algorithmic reasoning in early mathematics. They are funded by the NSF’s Division of Research on...

Amy Pickering - Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

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

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. We will evaluate this model through an...

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: Check back for status     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, 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: Check back for status     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

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: Full- no new appr needed     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...

Matthew Potts - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Overview: Public debates and policies are increasingly shifting to include nature and nature-related risks and mitigations in climate discourse. Chief among nature-related risks are issues centered on biodiversity. These frameshifts are evidenced by multilateral agreements such as the Global Biodiversity Framework and a suite of regulations coming out...

Matthew Potts - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Forest restoration is an increasingly relevant topic across the globe, hailed as a key component to solutions for climate change, biodiversity crises, and sustainable development. Despite a growing awareness of the importance of forests and the need for ecosystem restoration, crucial information on natural forest regeneration processes is often lacking...

Matthew Potts - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Project Overview El Salvador is undergoing rapid transformations driven by cryptocurrency-driven urbanization (“crypto urbanism”) and the recent lifting of the metal mining ban. These developments pose significant threats to the country’s protected natural regions, including biodiversity hotspots and critical ecosystems. This project investigates the socio-environmental impacts of these...

Mary Power - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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...

Ndola Prata - Professor, Public Health

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

This research project is focused on improving the lives of Black Birthing people in California. The postpartum period, or care after birth is one of the most important periods during the birthing cycle, yet there are limited resources during that time. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...

Ndola Prata - Professor, Public Health

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

IUD’s are one of the most effective contraceptives to prevent unintended pregnancies. However, pain remains to be a significant barrier for access. Our qualitative study aims to investigate providers’ perceptions, beliefs, and practices to manage pain during IUD insertions...

Ndola Prata - Professor, Public Health

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

Suicide is a serious public health problem globally. There are about 800,000 deaths by suicide globally. Of these, 77% are in low-and-middle income countries. For each suicide, 35 - 140 people are affected, but very few seek care. Individuals bereaved by suicide also experience stigma and therefore are reluctant...

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...

Kamalini Ranasinghe - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

The goal of this project is to investigate the associations between anormal protein depositions in the brain and how these may change the neuronal firing in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We use magnetoencephalography (MEG) electroencephalography (EEG) to record the activity of neurons and molecular imaging to quantify amyloid...

Aruna Ranganathan - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This project examines the experiences of Qawwali musicians in India through open-ended interviews. We are in the early stages of analysis, so we are primarily looking for trends and creating categories from the data. So far we have identified broad effects of gender and identity on satisfaction and success...

Aruna Ranganathan - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

Virtual Coworking platforms (e.g. CoFocus, Focusmate, Flow Club, Groove) have experienced a surge in popularity during the pandemic, especially among students, remote workers, and entrepreneurs/solopreneuers. We are in the early stages of analysis, so we are primarily seeking additional employment and demographic information of virtual coworkers from their LinkedIn...

Aruna Ranganathan - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

This project examines gender differences in productivity and engagement in remote work settings. Conducted with software testers in India, the experiment involves a comprehensive analysis of work patterns, interruptions, and productivity metrics in both remote and in-person settings. The study employs multiple data collection methods, including video observations, surveys...

Eva Raphael - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are among the most common bacterial infections worldwide, particularly among urban-dwelling women. UTIs are primarily caused by Escherichia coli (E. coli). UTIs may cause a range of complications from mild discomfort to severe kidney infections. As antibiotic resistance increases, treatment strategies for UTIs become ineffective...

Onja Razafindratsima - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Seed dispersal, the movement of seeds away from parent plants, is vital for plant population dynamics and habitat colonization. In tropical forests, most plants rely on frugivorous animals for dispersal via endozoochory, where animals consume fruits and defecate viable seeds at favorable microsites. The dispersal patterns of frugivores depend on...

Onja Razafindratsima - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Forest regeneration and seed dispersal are essential ecological processes for maintaining biodiversity, ecosystem stability, and carbon sequestration. However, these processes are being threatened by agricultural expansion and defaunation. As a first step toward understanding the importance of animal seed dispersers in forest regeneration, this project aims to assess the diversity...

Onja Razafindratsima - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

What mechanism drives primate foraging decisions in their natural environments? How do these decisions influence the outcomes of the vital ecosystem services they provide? Our research group is interested in addressing such fundamental questions, contributing to elucidating the ecological and evolutionary aspects of primate behavior and crafting conservation solutions for...

Andrew Reddie - Professor, Public Policy

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

Reflecting frontier national and international concerns, BRSL is currently focused on three research areas: Defense Analysis and Strategy, Technology, Governance, and (Inter)National Security, and Industrial Policy and Economic Competition. Across these three areas BRSL conducts analytical work, designs and fields wargames and table-top exercises, and engages with policy...

Andrew Reddie - Professor, Public Policy

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

We are looking for students interested in working with us on a project examining how state and non-state actors’ proliferation and use of precision capabilities in the Middle East influence crisis stability dynamics. In the past few years, precision technologies in missiles, drones, and bombs have been widely used...

Andrew Reddie - Professor, Public Policy

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

The growing demand for energy generation to power the global population growth, the rise in artificial intelligence, and the use of electric vehicles is driving an resurgence and expansion in the demand for fission-based nuclear power. We propose an in-depth study on how this growing demand will change...

Diana Reddy - Professor, Law

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

This project explores the relationship between the many laws that regulate work in the United States, social movement activism, and changing American political economic commitments. Specifically, it investigates line-drawing in popular discourse about the meaning of work and how best to regulate it from the 1950s through today, during...

Carolina Reid - Professor, City and Regional Planning

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

An equitable transition to low-carbon homes in California requires implementation approaches that effectively reach underserved communities, including low-income and communities of colors. This study, conducted in partnership with community-based and advocacy organizations across California, is designed to increase understanding of how different governance/program structures are undertaking...

Carolina Reisenman - Associate Researcher, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Plants produce many toxic compounds as defense against insect herbivory. Many insects have therefore developed adaptations to counteract the negative effects of toxic compounds. Indeed, some species evolved mechanisms that allow them to use these toxic hosts as private niches, avoiding competition with other insects. In this project the student...

Laurent Reyes - Professor, Social Welfare

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

As the nation ages it will also become more ethnoracially diverse. Primarily, the share of older Hispanics is projected to double, from 16 percent to 28 percent in the next 30 years. These research projects investigates how older Latine adults navigate social services in Oakland, Richmond, and San Francisco. The...

Robert Rhew - Professor, Geography

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

We are will accept up to 3 Fall URAP students to join the Atmospheric Biogeochemistry Laboratory for projects involving the terrestrial sources and sinks of trace gases in the atmosphere, including methane, methyl halides, hydrogen, and hydrocarbons. Students will gain laboratory skills and experience, including: prepping air sampling equipment, conducting...

Richard Rhodes - Professor , Canadian Studies Program

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

This project aims to create teaching materials that can be used to increase knowledge of Canada among undergraduates and the general public. This will include creating short articles for public distribution about Canadian culture, history, and contemporary political issues. The student's work will ultimately build towards creating a proposal and...

Filipa Rijo-Ferreira - Professor, Public Health

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

Earth rotation was an evolutionary pressure for organisms to evolve circadian rhythms in order to be able to anticipate the rhythmic day/night cycles. These circadian clocks regulate physiological properties such as sleep, immune response and metabolism. Our lab studies circadian clocks in parasites. This project focus on performing bioinformatics...

Filipa Rijo-Ferreira - Professor, Public Health

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

Parasitic diseases cause major health burden worldwide, with over 1 million deaths each year. Despite having the genome of many parasites sequenced, almost half of their genes are of unknown function. There are still major gaps in our understanding of host-parasite interactions and disease transmission by vectors. Our research...

Filipa Rijo-Ferreira - Professor, Public Health

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

The rotation of the Earth has exerted evolutionary pressure on organisms to develop circadian rhythms, enabling them to anticipate day/night cycles. These daily rhythms are observed across all life forms, regulating physiological functions such as sleep, immune response, and metabolism. Our lab focuses on studying circadian clocks in parasites...

George Roderick - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

This project is focused on the residential urban gardens of the East Bay and how those gardens impact butterfly communities with a focus on the Western Monarch butterfly. The project covers topics of native and non-native plants, invasive arthropods, urban gardens, and changes in species interactions. This project is...

George Roderick - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

In our lab, we are interested in the ecology and evolutionary history of arthropod (insect and spider) species. We mostly study arthropods from Hawaii and other islands in the Pacific, but also species in California and elsewhere. Some are native species, some are recent invasive species, and some are introduced...

George Roderick - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Are you interested in science news and social media? In our lab, we study the ecological and evolutionary history of arthropod (insect and spider) species--the "little things that run the earth." We mostly study arthropods from Hawaii and other islands in the Pacific. Our current project aims...

George Roderick - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Biodiversity surveys often accumulate many many insect and spider specimens, but it is usually hard to figure out what the species actually are. Many species are not yet described and many are found in an area for the first time, or the species are not yet in DNA databases. In...

Hector Rodriguez - Professor, Public Health

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

The objective of this project is to survey and analyze language access services and infrastructure of 150 safety net primary care practices across California to understand and improve how language access needs are met for patients with Limited English Proficiency (LEP). This project is funded by the California Health Care...