ASTRA
Undergraduate researchers wanted

Make AI safe, secure,
and trustworthy

ASTRA — AI Security, Trust, Resilience, and Assurance — is a small research group at UC Berkeley. We're looking for motivated undergraduates to conduct research in AI safety, AI security, and AI for security.

See open positions → Learn about us
Mission

Why ASTRA

AI systems are being deployed faster than we can understand their failure modes. ASTRA studies how to make them safe, secure, and reliable — and how to turn them into tools that defend, not just systems that need defending.

Real research

You work on open problems with a path to publication — designing experiments, building systems, and writing up results.

Mentorship

Small group, close guidance. You meet regularly with experienced researchers who invest in your growth.

Ownership

You take a research question from idea to result — driving it end to end and presenting your progress to the group.

Open Positions

Research areas

All positions are for current UC Berkeley undergraduates, with flexible weekly hours during the semester.

Undergraduate Researcher — AI Safety

Undergraduate · Berkeley

Study when and why models behave in unintended ways: alignment, evaluations, red-teaming, and robustness of large language models and agents. Ideal if you have some ML background and strong Python skills.

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Undergraduate Researcher — AI Security

Undergraduate · Berkeley

Attack and defend AI systems themselves: adversarial examples, jailbreaks, prompt injection, data poisoning, and securing agentic pipelines. A security mindset matters more than prior AI experience.

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Undergraduate Researcher — AI for Security

Undergraduate · Berkeley

Use AI to strengthen software and systems security: LLM-assisted vulnerability discovery, program analysis, fuzzing, and automated threat detection. Systems or security coursework is a plus.

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Not sure which area fits? Apply anyway and tell us what excites you — we'll help you find a project.

Apply

How to apply

  1. Fill out the application form. Tell us which research area interests you and why, and share anything you've built or written that you're proud of (course projects, CTFs, papers, code).
  2. Intro chat. A 30-minute conversation about your background, interests, and availability.
  3. Starter task. A small, well-scoped exercise or paper discussion so we can see how you think.
  4. Join the group. You're matched with a project and a mentor, and start attending group meetings.
Apply now →

The form takes about 10 minutes. We read every application.