News

UC Merced Leaps Up in Nature Index’s Young University Rankings

December 9, 2021

UC Merced has earned the distinction of ranking No. 20 among the world's Rising Young Universities, according to the just-released Nature Index 2021 Young Universities — the only U.S. institution to place in the top 25. Among the leading 150 Young Universities, UC Merced ranks No. 80, and for...

OMRON Endowed Scholarship to Help Engineering Students in the Robotics Field

November 4, 2021

Many UC Merced students are first-generation college students, meaning they are the first in their families to pursue college degrees and the types of careers having a degree affords. UC Merced’s strong relationships with industry partners plays a key role in helping students navigate these career...

NSF Awards CCBM Center $5 Million to Continue STEM Research

October 27, 2021

UC Merced’s NSF-CREST Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Machines (CCBM) has been awarded an additional $5 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue its mission. In total, the NSF has invested $10 million in the center, an indicator of the importance of the Center’s work and...

USDA-funded Internship Program Introduced New Bobcats to Agriculture Research

September 20, 2021

Shortly before the fall semester kicked off in person, 11 students were wrapping up their first summer on campus as part of the FACTS summer bridge program. FACTS stands for San Joaquin Valley Food and Agriculture Cyberinformatics Tools and Science. The six-week summer course, funded by the United...

Spencer Lab Publishes New Technique for Live Imaging

August 31, 2021

Some scientific discoveries are a happy accident (think: penicillin). Others have been there all along, they just take a keen eye to notice, which was recently the case in Professor Joel Spencer’s lab. An observation Spencer made during his postdoctoral appointment at Harvard University laid the...

Campus Wastewater Testing Offers COVID-19 Early Warning System, Establishes Protocols for the Future

July 8, 2021

COVID-19 upended life as we know it, especially among the science community. While some scientists rushed to develop a vaccine, others sought a better understanding of the virus, hoping to predict where the next outbreak might be in order to better contain it. At UC Merced, this included testing...

Engineering Professor Awarded $1 Million NSF Award to Study Protein Folding

June 16, 2021

Proteins operate like biological machines, regulating nearly every major function and organ in our bodies through a still-mysterious shape-shifting process. Bioengineering graduate group chair Professor Victor Muñoz has a new $1,082,356 award from the National Science Foundation to unlock those...

UC Merced Professors on TV to Inspire Girls to Consider STEM Careers

May 13, 2021

UC Merced takes pride in encouraging the younger generation to learn more about science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers by counting on some of the top educators in the fields. To help expand the knowledge and encourage young girls to think about careers within STEM,...

Engineering Ag Tech Solutions Just One Element of Annual Innovate to Grow Expo

May 12, 2021

You can’t avoid seeing grazing cattle in California’s Central Valley, where UC Merced has its own pastured cows on campus. Now imagine if those cows were kept secluded without the use of a fence, or at least not one visible to the eye. This is just one of the experimental projects teams of...

$2.2M NIH Grant Designed to Produce Highly Trained, Diverse Ph.D. Workforce

April 28, 2021

A five-year, $2.2 million training grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will assist UC Merced with the development of diverse cohorts of doctoral students in interdisciplinary biomedical disciplines. Twelve trainees each academic year will benefit from NIH’s longstanding Graduate...