Grants

The most extreme drought event in hundreds of years caused a catastrophic die-off of the Sierra Nevada’s mature trees in 2015-2016.

A study published today in Nature Geoscience details how UC Merced Professor Roger Bales and his colleague Professor Michael Goulden from UC Irvine tracked the progress of the devastation caused by years of dry conditions combined with abnormally warm temperatures.

Overdoses and suicides were among the most common reasons for mothers dying within a year of giving birth in California, according to a new study published this week.

Most people wouldn’t think sharks can teach researchers about the planet’s distant past and its more immediate future.

UC Merced paleoecologist Professor Sora Kim isn’t most people.

There’s a connection between data in fossilized shark teeth and climate change, and thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation, she aims to use that information to better understand climate change.

Children who live near major roads are at higher risk for developmental delays because of traffic-related pollutants.

That’s the major finding of a new study authored by UC Merced environmental epidemiology Professor Sandie Ha and colleagues. The study appears in the journal Environmental Research and is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the UC Merced Senate Grant.

The majority of people who die by suicide do so with firearms, and there were more firearm suicides in America in 2017 than there were homicides committed by any method. Combined.

Those shocking numbers from the FBI and American Foundation for Suicide Prevention are the impetus for two UC Merced professors from very different disciplines to join forces to try and predict who is most likely to commit suicide using a gun.

Certain aspects of children's social cognition ripple throughout their lives, including whether small children can understand that other people’s minds are different than their own.

That understanding plays a critical role in relationships, cooperation with other people and even in academic performance.

For the past 20 years, developmental psychologists have operated under the belief that children from low-income backgrounds are severely delayed in developing this skill.

You can smell them a mile away; there’s no mistaking the smell of cows and their methane emissions.

The odor, of course, comes from tons of methane-spewing manure. Thanks to a multimillion-dollar grant from the California Strategic Growth Council’s competitive Climate Change Research Program, Professor Gerardo Diaz and his interdisciplinary team of UC Merced faculty will look to subdue that stench while also caring for the planet.

A $4.6 million grant to UCs Merced and Irvine will help researchers develop new tools and methods for better managing the state’s forests, shrub lands and grasslands.

Imagine exploring the cores of stars to understand — and ultimately control — the type of fusion that’s taking place.

High-energy density (HED) science is the study of properties and behavior of matter and radiation in extreme temperatures and pressures common to the deep interiors of the largest planets. It’s also the foundation of understanding fusion energy and high-energy astrophysical phenomena, and it’s happening at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, just 75 miles from UC Merced.

Psychology Professor Eric Walle ’s Interpersonal Development Lab will recruit local infants and mothers as an important and unique part of a large-scale study focusing on the development of young children.

Led by scientists at New York University and Pennsylvania State University, the Play and Learning Across a Year (PLAY) project involves 65 researchers across the United States and Canada and is funded by a $6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.