Undergraduate students interested in data science have a unique opportunity to apply the skills learned in class to hands-on research projects led by UC Berkeley faculty.
The Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP) is the perfect way to get involved in Berkeley’s world-renowned research and develop more advanced skills. URAP is one of the signature programs of a Berkeley education. Students can also earn 1 unit of academic credit for every three hours of research work (limit of 4 units per term).
There are numerous projects currently open for applications on the URAP website from more than 300 mentors that require a data science approach. If you would like to get involved in a research project, you need to act soon. The deadline for project applications is Tuesday, August 30, at 8:00 a.m.
Of the many possibilities that use your data science skills, you might be interested in applying for projects like these:
Environment:
- Big data mapping: Analyzing the impact of geographic information
- Impact and adaptation to climate change in California water resources
- Land use/land cover analysis in the West African Sahel
- Understanding environmental change and waterborne disease in developing countries
Biology, Medicine, and Public Health:
- Neuroeconomics: Decision-making and the brain
- Biodiversity informatics and GIS at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology
- Improving Asian & Pacific Islander health through community health center research
Physical Sciences and Engineering:
- Imaging lost voices: High resolution optical scanning of historical sound recordings
- Neutrino physics
- Network science for nonproliferation
Social Sciences and Policy:
- Building and refining text analysis tool to discover patterns in police and protester interactions
- Increasing public trust in science: A randomized field experiment on attitudes towards vaccines
- Health care reform in California
- Terner Center for Housing Innovation
- Funding and growth of LGBTQ NGOs
Humanities
- The Digital Humanities in practice: Not reading English novels, 1750-1830
- Building computational models of literary texts
- Hellenistic Babylonia: texts, images and names
Core Data Science:
- Innovation analytics
- Computational models of human cognition
- Machine learning for multimedia big data
- Data sharing and citations
BIDS Projects:
- Machine Shop, scikit-image, and Jupyter Notebook
- BIDS Collaborative
- Learning data science (Data Science Education Program)
Detailed information about the program can be found on the URAP website, and if you have questions, you can email urap@berkeley.edu.
We hope that you take advantage of these tremendous opportunities now and look out for more information ahead of the spring semester, when we plan to offer new services and opportunities to help our campus faculty and students make connections and foster new skills.
Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) and Berkeley Data Science Education Program (DSEP)