URAP

Sandya Subramanian - Professor, Computational Precision Health

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

Our lab works on developing new AI-based and statistical tools for analyzing various physiological time series. One of the most important among these is heartbeat dynamics, which is the beat-to-beat variation in electrical activity to the heart. We develop models that blend deep neural networks and traditional...

Sandya Subramanian - Professor, Computational Precision Health

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

Our lab proposes to model the autonomic nervous system - the system in the body that "keeps the lights on" so to speak - as a connected and dynamic network. To do this, we need to design metrics to summarize the state of the network succinctly so that we can track changes...

Jun Sunseri - Professor, Anthropology

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

The San Francisco Bay Area is the ancestral homelands of several Native American tribes that include Ohlone, Coast Miwok, Bay Miwok, and Patwin peoples. These peoples built and maintained polities, towns, villages, camps, food processing and tool production areas, etc. that have left physical traces on the landscape. Some of...

Jun Sunseri - Professor, Anthropology

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

Our partnered projects include community-based, collaborative partnership involving our team working under the mentorship of Tribal Leaders from the Mono Lake Kootzaduka’a , Colfax-Todds Valley Consolidated Tribes, Shingle Springs Miwok, and the Ohlone Indian Tribe. These leaders have directed the products of our collaborative research at their Ancestral Places...

Jun Sunseri - Professor, Anthropology

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

The Archaeological Research Facility is teaming with us to develop detailed photorealistic 3D models of WW2 aircraft that went down in remote areas. The project team has begun detailed photo documentation of vintage aircraft in museums and private collections to understand what airframe components (hard points and high-density parts...

Jun Sunseri - Professor, Anthropology

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

Rosemary Joyce's Honduran archaeology project is a community-based archaeological and anthropological project between the University of California researchers and community members in Central America. Data from the animal bone and shell assemblages will inform the research from these sites...

Madhumita Sushil - Professor, Medicine

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

Our lab focuses on the development and application of foundation models for improving diagnosis and prognostic assessment of brain tumors. Brain tumors are a complex pathology where neurosurgical interventions are critical. However, little is known about who these interventions benefit, whether complications can occur during the surgical procedures, and who...

Madhumita Sushil - Professor, Medicine

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

Rare diseases affect 1 in 10 people worldwide, but our understanding of these diseases remains very limited. Our team has developed a RAG pipeline to retrieve and embed clinical notes to enable searching for patients diagnosed with a given disease. This enables research in rare diseases to advance their understanding...

Eve Sweetser - Professor, Linguistics

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

It has long been known that co-speech gesture reveals aspects of on-line cognition which may not be revealed in speech itself. This project investigates the usage of gestures accompanying modals (e.g. CAN, MUST, MAY, SHOULD) and conditionals (IF-clauses), to see what understandings of modality and conditional relationships...

Eve Sweetser - Professor, Linguistics

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

This group is a multilingual project, examining discourse about COVID-19 and about global climate change, in North American English, French and Spanish varieties, as well as in French of France. (A side project on Mandarin metaphor is not funded, but is also ongoing.) We are using the Coronavirus corpus...

Ian Swinburne - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Compartmentalized fluid pressures organize many aspects of development and physiology. Because water is incompressible, pressure changes propagate rapidly and uniformly (Pascal’s law), coordinating collective cell behaviors. In the eye, fluid pressure plays an important role in producing and maintaining shape for vision. The anterior chamber (AC) of the eye is...

Ian Swinburne - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Mechanical stress is a fact of life. Fluid pressure is required for the function of the circulatory system, ear, and eye. Tissues stretch and contract during morphogenesis, locomotion, and wound healing. But how do tissues (and the cells that constitute them) adapt and respond to changes in the physical stresses...

Ian Swinburne - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

The vertebrate inner ear is composed of a series of connected fluid-filled cavities tightly regulated by undefined pressure-responsive mechanisms. Misregulation of this internal hydrostatic (fluid) pressure can result in developmental defects in the ear, hearing loss, and difficulties with balance. The endolymphatic sac (EDS) is a flexible chamber...

Ian Swinburne - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Most life processes involve cells managing fluids. Our sense of hearing and balance depend on the tight regulation of inner ear fluid (endolymph) volume and pressure. Increased endolymph volume and pressure can lead to the development of deafness and balance disorders. Our previous work in zebrafish embryos has shown that...

Paul Szabo - Research Scientist, Space Sciences Laboratory

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

Our Moon is continuously exposed to protons from the solar wind and Earth’s magnetosphere. Upon impact, these ions alter the Moon’s surface and contribute to the formation of water. Some of the protons end up scattered away as neutral hydrogen atoms. Instruments onboard NASA’s IBEX spacecraft have been able to...

Paul Szabo - Research Scientist, Space Sciences Laboratory

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

The surface of Mercury is continuously exposed to ions from the solar wind and its own magnetosphere. Upon impact, these ions alter Mercury’s surface, cause surface erosion, and contribute to the formation of water. Mercury’s intrinsic global magnetic field and its interaction with the solar wind plasma stream make this...

Michi Taga - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

Bacteria and other microbes are key players in critical processes such as recycling of Earth’s nutrients and protecting host organisms from disease. Most microbes exist in complex, multi-species communities (microbiomes) where nutrients produced by some species are used by others. The Taga lab studies corrinoids, cofactors in the vitamin...

Lee Tan - Professor, Neurosurgery- Spine

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

The UCSF Spine Center is a leading contributor to the American Spine Registry, a nationwide initiative dedicated to improving outcomes for patients undergoing cervical and lumbar spine surgery through the collection of longitudinal clinical data. Our research team investigates minimally invasive spine surgery, predictors of cancer recurrence and complications in...

Timothy Tangherlini - Professor, Scandinavian

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

The Icelandic Family Sagas are an intriguing window onto the social world of 10th and 11th century Iceland, seen through the authorial lens of late medieval writers. A striking characteristic of the sagas is the abundance of characters that interact in and across complex social networks as they first initiate...

Timothy Tangherlini - Professor, Scandinavian

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

The Berkeley folklore archive is one of the largest, student-created folklore archives in North America. Started in the 1960s, the archive houses over 500,000 records detailing the everyday life and informal culture of thousands of students and their communities. In 2020, the archive began digitizing these records. Along with...

Rebecca Tarvin - Professor , Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

Evolutionary transitions underlying phenotypic change are difficult to study because they often occur over millions of years. However, the fruit fly has a short generation time and a small genome that is well annotated and cheap to sequence. We used a large-scale experimental evolution approach to evolve toxin-sequestering...

Rebecca Tarvin - Professor , Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

The Tarvin Lab studies how and why poison frogs don’t poison themselves. We aim to measure the effect of toxin consumption on frog health and chemical defenses through toxin feeding experiments paired with phenotypic assays (health monitoring, jumping challenges), chemical quantification (GCMS), and genomic assessment (RNA and DNA sequencing...

Rebecca Tarvin - Professor , Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

Amphibians -- frogs, salamanders, and caecilians -- exhibit a stunning variety of chemical defenses, ranging from antimicrobial peptides to antipredator neurotoxins and biological glues. Amphibian glues are the least-studied of these defenses. Additionally, the methods used to measure amphibian stickiness are not standardized, with some researchers gluing together beer cans to...

Rebecca Tarvin - Professor , Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

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

Poison frogs are known for their diverse array of colors and color patterning. The Tarvin Lab studies the genetics and diversity of color in Epipedobates poison frogs from Ecuador. Currently we are generating whole-genome resequencing data for >400 individual frogs that vary in their color from brown to bright...

Rowland Taylor - Professor, Optometry

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

Amacrine cells are inhibitory interneurons in the retina that shape how visual information is processed before it leaves the eye. Although there are upwards of 60 distinct amacrine cell types in the mammalian retina, only a small subset have been well characterized. This gap in knowledge limits our ability to...

Frederic Theunissen - Professor, Psychology

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

Our laboratory studies vocal communication in animals and would like to develop an automatic detecter and classifier for bird calls using advanced machine learning techniques...

Frederic Theunissen - Professor, Psychology

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

How does the brain represent meaningful information from sound? This project investigates this question by examining natural vocal communication between zebra finches. Zebra finches are gregarious songbirds with a very rich vocal repertoire of calls to communicate in different behavioral contexts: peer recognition, mate interactions, offspring care, etc. In such...

Frederic Theunissen - Professor, Psychology

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

The apprentice(s) will prepare and analyze neural tissue to assist graduate students and staff scientists with ongoing projects. This will include slicing, mounting (on microscope slides), and imaging of brain tissue to verify where electrodes were placed during electrophysiological recordings, as well as other projects. Apprentice(s) will learn...

Frederic Theunissen - Professor, Psychology

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

Project Description: The zebra finch has a very rich vocal repertoire of communication calls that are used in distinct behavioral contexts: peer recognition and localization, mate interactions, offspring care, etc. We previously gathered a huge bank of these calls, classifying them along call-types, i.e. groups of calls used in...

Hannah R. Thompson - Professor, Public Health

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

Current dietary guidelines recommend that children transition from whole-fat cow's milk to low-fat (1%) cow's milk beginning at 2 years of age. However, this recommendation was not established using rigorous randomized controlled trial evidence in toddlers. Because federal nutrition assistance programs and institutions that receive federal funding—including...

Hannah R. Thompson - Professor, Public Health

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

School recess is an evidence-backed approach to increase school-based opportunities for students to play, accrue necessary physical activity, and socialize with peers, to the benefit of their physical, academic, and socioemotional health. As such, the Centers for Disease Control recommend at least 20 min of daily recess in...

Hannah R. Thompson - Professor, Public Health

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

School recess is an evidence-backed approach to increase school-based opportunities for students to play, accrue necessary physical activity, and socialize with peers, to the benefit of their physical, academic, and socioemotional health. As such, the Centers for Disease Control recommend at least 20 min of daily recess in...

Hannah R. Thompson - Professor, Public Health

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

The federal Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) is one of the nation’s most effective public health nutrition programs. It provides free, healthy foods and personalized nutrition education, breastfeeding support and referrals to other services for over 6.8 million low-income pregnant and postpartum women and...

William Thompson - Professor, Psychology

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

The Computational Cognitive Science lab (https://ccs-ucb.github.io) conducts experimental studies of human intelligence, focusing on reasoning and learning in multi-agent contexts. We have new and ongoing studies surrounding e.g. discovery, problem-solving, and belief formation during interactions between human participants and AI systems. Our studies leverage web technologies...

William Thompson - Professor, Psychology

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

The computational cognitive science lab (ccs-ucb.github.io) studies how knowledge is transmitted from one agent to another, among humans and machines. This project examines the transmission of knowledge from one model to another using open source LLMs. You will learn about methods for on-policy distillation (e.g. https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog...

Gregory Timmel - Director, OLAC

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

The role of the veterinarian in the research environment has become increasingly critical in recent years. Not only are lab animal veterinarians involved in research involving animal health, but in research endeavors as they relate to and intersect with human or public health (e.g., nutrition, cancer studies, and infectious disease...

Denis Titov - Assistant Adjunct Professor, Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology

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

ATP powers most energy-consuming reactions in cells. While ATP has a short half-life, the demand for ATP also fluctuates. Thus, ATP or energy homeostasis in cells needs to be appropriately regulated. ATP homeostasis has to perform at least three tasks: allow energy generation from ATP hydrolysis, maintain stable...

Denis Titov - Assistant Adjunct Professor, Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology

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

Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency is the most common genetic defect across the globe, affecting over 400 million individuals. Formerly known as favism, the hallmark of this condition is the triggering of hemolytic anemia events upon exposure to certain environmental stressors including foods and medications. G6PD is the first...

Denis Titov - Assistant Adjunct Professor, Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology

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

Aging is the greatest risk factor for numerous chronic conditions such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and neurodegeneration. Once thought to be an uncontrollable stochastic process due to an accumulation of damage over time, genes and regulatory networks have been discovered that modulate the rate of aging. Supported by data in...

Robert Tjian - Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Regulation of DNA transcription is one of the mechanisms at the core of cellular identity establishment and maintenance. Our lab is interested in studying the proteins that operate such regulation, transcription factors (TFs). The student will participate in a project that aims to assess the nuclear dynamics of developmentally-related...

John Tomsick - Research Scientist, Space Sciences Laboratory

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

The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) is a NASA-funded gamma-ray space telescope currently in the calibration and characterization phase at Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL). After launch (anticipated August 2027), COSI will survey the 0.2–5 MeV sky as the most sensitive telescope in history in the energy range...

Eos Trinidad - Professor , Education

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

This research will help develop a national database of K-12 state mid-level education agencies across the US. It aims to inform new research on the role of mid-level agencies in supporting education across different states. This will advance our thinking on how education can improve in a...

Eos Trinidad - Professor , Education

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

Among the most interesting, controversial, and consequential decisions in education policies have emerged from social scientists in Chicago. The likes of Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, Dan Lortie, James Coleman, Anthony Bryk, James Heckman, and Eve Ewing have contributed to important research that influenced democratic schooling, school choice, human capital development...

Eos Trinidad - Professor , Education

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

This project aims to create a systematic accounting of sociological studies of education, and create a framework to understand how different studies are connected with each other. The team will create an archive of publications, scholars, and awards connected to sociology of education during a 23-year period with the...

Marta Truchado- Garcia - Project Scientist, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Despite dramatically different body architectures, animals share common signaling pathways and transcriptional networks that regulate their development, a core “genetic toolkit.” Asymmetries are essential for proper organization and function of organ systems, and we aim to examine the toolkit that underlies left-right asymmetry (LRA) in different animal groups. Genetic...

Marta Truchado- Garcia - Project Scientist, Molecular and Cell Biology

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

Ctenophores (from Greek, meaning "comb-bearing") are gelatinous marine invertebrates that might be mistaken for medusae. However, they can be easily identified by their eight longitudinal 'comb rows' of ciliary bundles, which are used for locomotion. Like cnidarians, ctenophores possess multiple nerve nets; however, they exhibit several unique features that...

Winston Tseng - Research Scientist, Public Health

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

PROJECT 1. The Central Valley towns of Allensworth is partnering with Gadgil Lab and Health Research for Action at UC Berkeley on a research project funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and National Alliance for Water Innovation. This project is about assessing community perspectives on water safety, community education, and...

Winston Tseng - Research Scientist, Public Health

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

The goal of the project is to conduct an evaluation of the Zoosiab program, a community-based prevention and early intervention program that aims to prevent and/or reduce further mental health problems and social isolation among Hmong elders by strengthening sense of community and social engagement, improving both psychological...

Winston Tseng - Research Scientist, Public Health

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

The purpose of the project is to understand the issues community assets and needs of the Samoan and Pacific Islander (PI) community in the San Francisco Bay Area for Samoan language and culturation preservation. Additional project areas may include to monitor and increase the visibility of Samoan/PI social and...

Jack Tseng - Professor, Integrative Biology

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

Several research specimens from the University of California Museum of Paleontology that have been recently studied and published are in need of new protective foam housing before they return to the museum collections for permanent storage...