Since 2011, the Hellman Fellows Fund has provided close to 60 UC Merced assistant professors with much-needed research support in the form of seed funding. The prestigious Hellman Fellowship has launched countless careers at UC Merced and across the UC system.

Now, thanks to a generous new $3.5 million gift from the Hellman family, UC Merced will permanently establish the UC Merced Society of Hellman Fellows starting in 2021. The endowment allows the program to continue in perpetuity, while affording the campus more flexibility in funding early-career research.

The Merced nAnomaterials Center for Energy and Sensing (MACES) —UC Merced’s NASA-funded center for nanomaterials-based research and education — has received a two-year, $1.8 million renewal from the federal space agency.

Continuing to build on the research already underway, Professor Jennifer Lu, the center’s director, said the next two years will see a focus on energy-materials research for space exploration.

Summertime means fun in the water, but as temperatures increase, algal blooms can grow in freshwater and marine ecosystems.

Some algae are natural and life-giving, while others are the result of life out of balance and can have harmful effects. Consisting of bacteria and tiny plankton, they arise quickly and alter the ecosystem by consuming available oxygen, killing fish.

Incoming first-year and transfer students will have a new resource for success and an introduction to research starting next summer, thanks to a four-year, $400,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

A UC Merced researcher and her lab have unlocked one of the mysteries that could lead to treatments — or even cures — for prion diseases in mammals.

Prion diseases are a family of rare, progressive neurodegenerative disorders that affect both humans — such as with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or fatal familial insomnia — and animals, such as mad-cow disease. These disorders are usually rapidly progressive and always fatal, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Hiking to the top of Marin County’s iconic Mount Tamalpais gave a group of UC Merced students not only a magnificent view of the Pacific Ocean, but insight into how they, as individuals, can contribute to their communities’ enrichment.

UC Merced students will be able to earn money for college by helping Merced County kids become strong readers thanks to a pilot grant from the AmeriCorps Service Fellowship program.

The grant, announced Monday and administered through California Volunteers, will give $3,000 to each of up to 24 students who provide 900 hours of literacy coaching as part of their 2020-21 academic curriculum.

A pair of UC Merced researchers are combining computational chemistry and machine learning principles to solve what seems to be an intractable problem at the heart of quantum mechanics: predicting the movement of electrons, also known as electron dynamics.

UC Merced Professor Peggy O’Day hopes to improve water quality in the California Delta by studying local wetlands.

O’Day is leading a new three-year study of Merced County wetlands that drain into the San Joaquin River and eventually the Delta.

Professor Jing Xu and her students study extremely tiny motor proteins, but their work could make a huge contribution to the growing body of knowledge about Alzheimer’s and other diseases that progressively destroy brain tissue.