In the 21st century, it seems that every decade, a new call arises for archaeology to take seriously queer theory and queer archaeologists to move towards the “deconstruction of the normative” as a necessary avenue for research, the discipline, and its practitioners. These moves include Thomas A. Dowson’s special issue entitled “Queer Archaeologies” published in the World Archaeology journal in 2000, Chelsea Blackmore’s publication of “How to Queer the Past Without Sex” in the Archaeologies journal in 2011, or the special issue of SAA The Archaeological Record, “Towards an Inclusive Field Archaeology,” edited by Chelsea Blackmore and Dawn Rutecki in 2016. However, over the last decade, most work on Queer Archaeology has been limited to individual research or single publications in various journals. Have we lost the impetus as a discipline to seriously consider Queer archaeology as a rich and necessary theoretical framework and social practice of research? 

In Latin America, Queer Archaeology is further impacted by a strong analytic focus on quantitative material analysis and the “machismo” ideology that pervades field-based disciplines, such as archaeology, even among the academic community. In this project, we aim to investigate the impact and imprint of Queer Archaeology in Latin America trough a ten year evaluation of 1) disciplinary flagship publications (in English, and Spanish), 2) abstracts of academic conferences, and 3) the positionalities of the scholars that are undertaking Queer Archaeology in Latin America (country of origin, country of home institution, career rank, gender identity when and if available). Our findings will be analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative measures to evaluate the impact of Queer Archaeology in Latin America. They will be presented at academic conferences and peer-reviewed publications in both the United States and Latin America. 

What you'll be doing: The student will work on mining academic publications and conference abstracts between 2016 and 2025 to create a database of keywords, types of research, and the number of publications associated with Queer Archaeology. The student will also work on developing a spatial geodatabase in ArcGIS Pro to conduct spatial-based analysis of the results. 

We investigate many mathematical aspects of artificial neural network representation of training data, and its performance in predicting the outcome of test data. 

What you'll be doing: simulations in JupyterLab with Python under supervision. Design simulations and analyze results under supervision. 

Several projects will be available in which students will run and/or analyze data from numerical experiments in fluid dynamics. The experiments are designed to measure the rate of transport of scalar fields such as heat and composition by turbulence, under various scenarios. This has potential applications to planets, stars, ocean, and atmosphere modeling.. 

What you'll be doing: the student will run and/or analyze data from numerical experiments in fluid dynamics, create models and figures to showcase the results.

This project explores how sperm from birds, toads, and frogs move through fluid environments and how their motion may be adapted to different reproductive strategies. Sperm motility is essential for fertilization, yet there is limited understanding of how non-mammalian sperm swim and how their shape and movement patterns influence performance. We use mathematical modeling and computer simulations to study how these cells navigate viscous fluids, which dominate motion at the microscopic scale. Each sperm cell’s flagellum is modeled as a flexible curve in space that bends according to a preferred curvature. To simulate the surrounding fluid, we use the Method of Regularized Stokeslets, which allows us to compute the fluid forces generated by flagellar movement. Species-specific flagellar shapes and motions are taken from biological observations and used to compare swimming speed, stability, and efficiency across species. We ask whether certain patterns of movement are more effective in reaching the egg and whether these differences reflect evolutionary responses to environmental or reproductive pressures such as internal fertilization or sperm competition. By combining tools from mathematics, biology, and computation, this project helps us understand how physical laws and biological needs intersect to shape the behavior of swimming cells in nature.

What you'll be doing: Student(s) will work on species-specific mathematical model development and running computational simulations as well as visualizing simulations. Student will be trained in Matlab and fortran to accomplish these goals.

https://www.mdpi.com/2311-5521/6/10/353 https://www.micropticsl.com/frog-sperm/ https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2019/04/05/Screw-shaped-bird-sperm-swims-faster-study-says/7331554485558/

The UC Climate Action Arts Network (CAAN) integrates arts and culture with climate justice to address pressing environmental challenges through innovative methodologies and collaborative techniques. CAAN will leverage exhibitions, workshops, and online platforms to co-create climate action knowledge with community partners. These efforts will include engaging climate-vulnerable communities to build capacity and enhance understanding of climate impacts across California.

Informed by the UN Art Charter for Climate Action and supported by a 2019 MPRI planning grant, CAAN will serve as a statewide network of interconnected arts centers, research institutes, and academic programs. It will foster interdisciplinary collaboration among artists, scientists, and community stakeholders to advance public discourse and policy-making on climate issues.

CAAN will employ inclusive methodologies such as cultural preservation, urban design, and workforce development. By integrating artistic production with scientific research, CAAN will amplify awareness and insight into climate challenges. Through competitive research fellowships, CAAN will support groundbreaking projects that transcend disciplinary boundaries, addressing the complex intersections of art, ecology, and human rights.

What you'll be doing: the student will work with art professor Jennifer Parker and graduate students to develop the platform, conducting research, drafting content, providing administrative and technical support, coordinating events, and engaging with community stakeholders.

https://openlabresearch.com/

https://art.ucsc.edu/event/past-event/2025/01/uc-systemwide-arts-collaboration-expands-with-the-success-of-groundbreaking-grant/

https://placemaking-uc.org/, https://www.unseencalifornia.com/ 

Our project is based on studying and unveiling the importance and role of species and their communication in mixed-species bird flocks. After many years working with these aspects in the Peruvian Amazon, we are now expanding our reach toward temperate zones, specifically around Californian mountains and environments. We will conduct field experiments in the ones we are going to record the responses of the individuals in the flock to a hawk-like model to understand communication among different species. 

https://www.forestfearlab.com/

The Smith Lab at UC Santa Cruz is conducting research on mechanisms of kelp forest ecosystem resilience. This project involves assessing the abundance of kelp spores and sea urchin larvae that are passively delivered by ocean currents to sea urchin barrens (areas void of kelp and dominated by an overabundance of actively grazing sea urchins) and to remnant patches of kelp forest. The Scholar will conduct research in the Smith lab at the Coastal Science Campus. 

What you'll be doing: student will process sampled retrieved by scientific SCUBA divers and will sort through samples under microscopes to identify and count larval urchins, kelp spores, crabs, and more. The student will also enter and check data. 

https://smithlab.ucsc.edu/ 

https://census.eeb.ucsc.edu/ 

We will be using videos taken underwater of the interactions between male and female marine fishes of the species Symphodus ocellatus to ask how individuals make decisions about how to behave and whether to reproduce at a site in response to the social behavior of others and the social environment. We will use a set of videos that have already been collected at our field site and students will work with the facutly mentor and two other graduate students in the research group to collect data from these videos. We will use a software called Boris to collect the behavioral data and we may also explore maching learning options as well. Students will have the opportunity to choose something of their own to study in the videos as well as learn how to analyze the data and make graphs using the freely available software R. 

What you'll be doing: The students will observe videos and collect data from them using an existing protocol. They will also be able to contribute to refining the data collect protocol., help with data management, and learn how to conduct analyses and make graphs in R. 

https://alonzo.sites.ucsc.edu/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocellated_wrasse

https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzanne-alonzo-a60b25176/

Internet unreachability caused by events such as Internet censorship and shutdowns, is a growing issue causing resistance to Free and Open Communications on the Internet. Our research uses Internet Measurement methods to detect current restrictions on Internet access globally, and the research project focuses on optimizing these measurements. 

What you'll be doing: The student will be helping with engineering, optimizing, and deploying the intelligent Internet measurement system. 

https://randlab.engineering.ucsc.edu

This undergraduate research project focuses on applying machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques to analyze and extract insights from energy systems data. With the growing complexity of modern power grids and the increasing integration of renewable energy sources, advanced data analytics plays a crucial role in improving grid reliability, forecasting demand and generation, and supporting decision-making for energy management.

Students will work with real-world datasets, such as electric load profiles, solar and wind generation, and smart meter readings. The project involves preprocessing large-scale time-series data, feature engineering, and exploratory data analysis to uncover temporal patterns and anomalies.

Methodologies include supervised learning techniques such as linear regression, decision trees, and support vector machines for energy demand prediction, as well as unsupervised learning methods like clustering for customer segmentation. On the deep learning side, students will implement and evaluate models such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for tasks including short-term load forecasting, anomaly detection, and renewable energy output prediction.

The project will emphasize model evaluation using metrics such as mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and root mean square error (RMSE), and encourage the use of open-source libraries like Scikit-learn and PyTorch. Students will gain hands-on experience in data-driven modeling, improving their programming, critical thinking, and communication skills.

https://people.ucsc.edu/~yzhan419/

This project will build a model for justice-centered community engagement for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) projects. CDR approaches remove legacy carbon emissions from the atmosphere through various processes, such as direct air capture (DAC) and wetland restoration (sometimes called nature-based solutions). CDR approaches are essential to climate responses, as evidenced by their inclusion in 100% of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models for staying below the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-degree threshold. 

While it is urgent to address climate change, our understanding of the technical elements of CDR is moving faster than our understanding of the social justice components, especially as related to local community concerns. Indeed, existing CDR projects have been heavily critiqued for inadequately incorporating community concerns, with project failure on the horizon in at least one high-profile case for this reason. As DAC and wetland restoration CDR projects have considerable local impacts, better assessing community concerns is essential to long-term successful CDR project implementation. 

What you'll be doing:  Student will work closely with faculty and PhD student in collecting and analyzing focus group and interview data. Ideally it will result in a co-authored publication.

UNBRAID : unravel is a documentary film project using interview, archival, and ritual performance to explore the filmmaker's relationship with their three mother figures: their Jewish-American adoptive mom, childhood nanny-turned-godmother, and Filipina first mother. The project approaches filmmaking as a restorative practice, drawing on adoption and kinship studies, care in the Filipino community, disability justice, and documentary accountability. The film takes both a personal and historical outlook, situating the impact of one adoption on three families within a greater context: U.S.-Philippine relations, domestic labor, migration, and diasporic experience.

What you'll be doing: the student will support with digital archiving, researching relevant films and articles, transcribing interviews, and preparing topics and questions for follow-up interviews with film participants. This is a hybrid position, where you will work remotely and meet with others on a weekly, or biweekly basis.

https://campusdirectory.ucsc.edu/cd_detail?uid=kgutie20 

This project centers Chicana political activism in San José, California from the mid-1970s to the end of the 20th century. It is anchored in the activism of the Chicanas who founded, joined, grew, and remembered the Chicana Coalition, a multigenerational grassroots political activist organization of women dedicated to local empowerment of Mexican American communities in San José. Principal methodologies include archival research, oral history, and textual analysis.

What you'll be doing: Students will be analyzing oral histories, conducting literature reviews on specific related topics, and learning to assess archival materials. 

The student will join our Santa Cruz Mountains Reserve internship crew in planning, conducting, and reporting on biodiversity at a partnering sustainable agricultural landscape called Cascade Ranch, just north of Ano Nuevo Reserve and State Park. Students will conduct a variety of biodiversity surveys including those for wetland plants, insects, mammals (small mammal trapping and wildlife cameras), bird surveys, and amphibian and reptile coverboards surveys. Students will have the chance to report on a variety of data, or hone in on one specific survey report and analysis of their choosing.

What you'll be doing: Students will be conducting biodiversity surveys for plants and animals at Cascade Ranch. Students will also work on data processing, reporting, map making, and analysis of biodiversity or work with a specific taxa (mammals, birds, herps, insects, plants) of their choosing.

https://santacruzmountainsreserve.ucsc.edu/internships/ 

Learn more about Indigenous philosophies and incorporate knowledge into course design for teaching undergraduate philosophy courses on ethics and the study of knowledge (epistemology). 

What you'll be doing: collecting resources (potential course readings) and building bridges with community partners. Student researcher would be contributing to the philosophy curriculum here at UCSC in meaningful ways and helping to reshape the philosophical canon

https://philosophy.ucsc.edu/people/faculty/?directoryprofilecruzid=jdinisha 

The team is interviewing farmworker parents and one of their adolescent children to understand their challenges and opportunities in the fields and for the adolescents.  We ask adolescents about their future hopes and aspirations, and ask the parents and students about the effects of climate change on their lives.

We are a collaborative team that requires some independent work and some collaborative work. 

What you'll be doing: help transcribe the interviews and find themes in parents' and adolescents' responses. All team members will transcribe interviews and help find the themes. We will discuss these in our weekly lab meeting.

Bilinguals face a remarkable challenge: they must constantly monitor their environment to determine which language is being used and select the appropriate one for communication. This project investigates how the bilingual brain accomplishes this task, applying methods from cognitive science such as EEG/ERP and eye-tracking experiments to capture how people process language in real time. By studying the neural and behavioral mechanisms that support bilingual language use, this work aims to deepen our understanding of how humans flexibly manage multiple linguistic systems.

Many of the experiments in our lab focus on code-switching, a common phenomenon where speakers alternate between languages within a conversation. In our studies, bilingual participants read or listen to sentences that suddenly switch into the other language. This allows us to measure how the mind responds to the unexpected change. Is the switch perceived as surprising, and if so, in what way? How long does it take the brain to adapt and continue processing the new language smoothly? By analyzing electrical brain activity and eye movement patterns, we can track the timing and dynamics of this adaptation process with precision.

Findings from these experiments will shed light on how bilinguals track which language is in use, adapt to changes, and maintain efficient communication across linguistic boundaries.

What you'll be doing:  assist with designing experimental materials, collecting data from bilingual participants, and processing behavioral and neural data for analysis..

There are several different projects that students can choose to work on: (1) a longitudinal study examining the impact of guaranteed income on low-income women and families; (2) a study examining experiences of housing precarity among LGBTQ+ UCSC students; and (3) a project assessing innovative strategies for distributing food and other resources to farmworkers.  

What you'll be doing: students will assist with qualitative data analysis (e.g., coding).

https://economicjustice.ucsc.edu/

The research projects of UCSC Baby Lab take a strengths-based approach to studying cultural ways of learning by toddlers, preschool-age children, and beyond.  We focus our research questions on everyday lived experiences of families of today's world.  For example, how do families with young children navigate device use while maintaining their cultural practices?  

In another project, we critically analyze the current research on food cognition (that tends to focus on white middle-class families) and work to address the diversity issues behind it.  For example, how can we study children's learning about healthful food in inclusive, unbiased ways by considering the lived experience with food of children from different backgrounds?  

In yet another project, we study how parents from different communities scaffold young children in difficult problem solving situations, including learning about causal relations of things they observe.  Our lab uses a wide range of methods and techniques, from experimental designs to interviewing, and from statistical analysis of large data to qualitative, reflexive methods. 

What you'll be doing:  students will contribute to all aspects of research including study design, data collection, analysis, and critically review the work done so far with opportunities for writing practice.

This projects examines how parents and children discuss different human traits, including different disabilities and mental illnesses. Parents and their 5- to 8-year-old children read short stories about characters with different traits and then discussed them. Some families saw stories using person-first language (e.g., "a person has blindness) or condition-first language (e.g., "a blind person"), to examine how language influences children's thinking and their conversations. We collected data from 71 families that participated in the study online. We are currently working on transcribing the videos of their conversations and conducting qualitative analyses of their interactions. 

What you'll be doing:  student will help transcribe the sessions and will be trained on qualitative analysis, that they will later apply to the data. The student will attend weekly lab meetings where they will be able to interact with other undergraduate and graduate students in the lab. 

This is a long term community-engaged research project following the work of two specific struggles, that of COPINH (an indigenous rights organization in Honduras) and Guapinol (a community struggling to protect their river from an extractive mining project in Northern Honduras).  In March of 2016, Berta Caceres, leader of COPINH was assassinated.  In September, 2024, Juan Lopez, leader of the committee for the defense of natural resources and the public good, the organization working with Guapinol, was assassinated.  Both struggles have continued to utilize popular education to push for justice for their slain leaders, and to highlight broader issues that communities in Honduras face.  By following the work of these two organizations, and their popular education campaigns, the research is highlighting the root causes of migration from the region, which are often counter to the narratives offered by mainstream media outlets (if they are offered at all) on migration from Central America and Honduras specifically. 

What you'll be doing:  the student will be supporting data collection from public forums, webinars, and social media posts on both cases, including researching curriculum on teaching migration and Central America more broadly.