Graduate Students

Graduate school is tough, but graduate students have a place to turn to for advocacy and support on campus.

Since it was established in 2005, UC Merced’s Graduate Student Association (GSA) has promoted graduate students’ rights and worked with the Graduate Division and other campus leadership to ensure that students’ best interests are met.

UC Merced occupies just one small corner of the world. But through the research, teaching, experience, and connections of two new Department of Physics faculty members, students can access and begin to understand the universe.

Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Marie-Odile Fortier’s plan to make more accurate assessments of renewable energy systems’ carbon footprints has made her the fifth UC Merced recipient of the prestigious CAREER award this year.

The award comes from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which gives the grants to encourage early-career researchers.

A computer science lab focused on making human-computer interaction easier for people of all abilities has developed a digital lip-reader complete with its own repair system so the software can continue learning from its user.

Physics Professor Dustin Kleckner has received a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award for his research — the third in his department this year. He studies how optical and acoustic binding controls interactions between/among particles and how it manipulates them into self-organizing structures.

In the long term, this research aims to enable fundamentally new types of materials for industrial, defense and consumer applications.

UC Merced master’s student Selina Brinkmann has been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship for study at Oxford University — a first for the campus.

Physics Professor Daniel Beller has received a CAREER award for his research into how complex organization arises from simple physical interactions for biological cells or polymers assembled in large numbers.

He is the 26th researcher from UC Merced and the sixth from the Department of Physics — and the second this year — to earn a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Professor Marc Beutel and his graduate student Mark Seelos have been recognized for papers and a presentation on toxic mercury mitigation by the North American Lake Management Society.

Beutel, an environmental engineer, co-wrote two of a group of three papers named Best Paper of the Year at the 2020 North American Lake Management Society annual conference.

Shakespeare can feel stuffy and difficult to understand. Native English speakers often struggle with decoding the Bard’s works, so imagine how difficult it would be to appreciate Shakespeare if you spoke another language.

This is the challenge UC Merced’s students and faculty took on with their bilingual production of “Ricardo El Segundo,” or “Richard II.”

In a record year for applicants to the entire University of California system, UC Merced has received a total of 30,105 prospective student applications among freshman and transfer students into the university — the highest number in the campus’s history. 

This comes as UC Merced hosted its largest-ever student population for fall 2020 — more than 9,000 undergraduate and graduate students.