Graduate Students

While the campus remained quieter than usual this summer, a group of new graduate students began their UC Merced journey earlier than the rest of their cohort.

Since opening its doors in August 2005, the UC Merced Library has served as the hub of the campus. That all changed when the coronavirus pandemic hit and the building was forced to close in March 2020. Now, the library is gearing up to reopen its doors on Aug. 16 and welcome back members of the university and community.

Quantitative Systems Biology Graduate Program alumni Kinsey Brock and Robert Boria were awarded Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biology (PRFB) from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Boria and Brock — both former members of paleoecology Professor Jessica Blois’ research group — graduated in May with doctoral degrees and are headed to top universities to continue their important research.

With a new $20 million federal grant, UC Merced becomes part of a multi-institutional research collaborative to develop artificial intelligence — or AI — solutions to tackle some of agriculture’s biggest challenges related to water management, climate change and integration of new technology into farming.

Every time you surf the web, check your credit card balance, or even sign up for a class at UC Merced, you’re using a relational database.

Relational databases are basically the back end of operating software, aggregating information and culling results based on your search or query. Improving the speed of these results, known as query optimization, is the focus of computer science and engineering Professor Florin Rusu and his third-year graduate students Yesdaulet Izenov and Asoke Datta.

As part of its commitment to inclusive excellence in graduate research and education, UC Merced has awarded its new Chancellor’s Fellowship for Inclusive Excellence to four incoming Ph.D. students from the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts whose studies will contribute to the representation of Black scholars in academia and beyond.

California is known for its beautiful coastline, where the Pacific Ocean meets sandy beaches and rugged cliffs. While many scientists have studied the land or the ocean independently, less is known about the nexus of the two.

Nearly 1.2 million students in California are not native English speakers, many coming from Spanish-speaking households. Transitioning to an English-speaking classroom can be difficult for these students, but UC Merced’s Teacher Preparation Program is poised to remedy these challenges with its recent bilingual authorization.

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 the campus’s wastewater.

UC Merced’s campus has many buildings, but just one pipe through which wastewater leaves the campus. This turned out to be helpful to discern whether there would be forthcoming positive COVID-19 test results.

When physics graduate student William Delmas made samples of solar energy harvesting perovskite films two years ago, he had no idea that this summer, he’d be analyzing those same samples after they made a round trip to the International Space Station (ISS).

“It’s really cool to see this come full circle,” Delmas said.