Graduate Students

Student researchers in experimental physics Professor Jing Xu’s lab have played a critical role in a study that will help understand Alzheimer’s and other diseases that progressively destroy brain tissue.

Solar films developed by a graduate student in the Department of Physics at UC Merced while on an internship at NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC) not only survived 10 months in space with minimal degradation, but the little damage they did incur was more than 90 percent reversible.

The Chancellor's Advisory Committee on the Status of Women (CACSW) has brought awareness to issues related to the campus climate for women since its founding at UC Merced in 2008. But after being greatly impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, the group is working to move forward promoting gender equity on campus.

CACSW, which is part of the Division of Equity, Justice, and Inclusive Excellence, is charged with:

Materials Science and Engineering Professor Beth Nowadnick has earned a National Science Foundation (NSF) award to study materials that may provide new ways to store or process information.

Nowadnick has been collaborating for the past two years with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) scientist Sinead Griffin on the project that led to the grant, which totals $379,374.

As more renewable energy projects take hold in California, there is more need for effective ways to store that energy.

A paper published by a UC Merced research team examines how the need for storage can vary for different combinations of renewable resources.

At UC Merced, mercury is a regional challenge that student and faculty researchers have been tackling for several years. Mercury was used to extract gold during the Gold Rush in California, and the element was also mined at the New Almaden site, at one time the second-largest mercury mine in the world near today’s Silicon Valley.

It's time for the campus and the community to celebrate UC Merced’s high-level research during Research Week, March 6 through 10.

The annual research showcase, hosted by the Office of Research and Economic Development, kicks off with a Health Sciences Research Institute (HSRI) event titled “Climate, Environment and Health: Impacting the San Joaquin Valley and Beyond.”

UC Merced once again broke a record for the number of first-year applications the university received, continuing to show impressive growth even as the national trend shows a decline in the number of students enrolling in higher education.

More than 26,000 prospective first-year, or freshmen, students applied for admission to the university. And nearly 4,000 students applied to transfer to UC Merced. Most of the applicants are from California.

Cognitive and Information Sciences (CIS) Ph.D. student Ben Nguyen spent last summer working as a data analyst at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

After transferring from a Sacramento community college to UC Merced in 2007, Maxine Umeh-Garcia was unsure of her future career. She admits she hadn’t looked at the majors the newest UC offered before applying and imagined she’d teach high school math.

She met with her academic advisor and learned the campus offered an applied mathematics major, not pure mathematics. They discussed other options and came to a stalemate.