Health

Bioengineering Professor Arvind Gopinath received a CAREER award for his research that seeks to understand how living biological materials such as bacterial swarms and fungal biofilms colonize surfaces, respond to physical features of their environments and cause infection.

He is the 25th researcher from UC Merced to earn this recognition from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Two new projects designed and led by UC Merced researchers will address challenges facing many Californians — wildfire recovery and agricultural labor — but will also have global reach.

Public Health doctoral student Sarah Alnahari was awarded a UC Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP) Predoctoral Fellowship to continue her community-driven research examining tobacco use among Arab Americans in the San Joaquin Valley.

The TRDRP is an initiative created through tobacco taxes and administered by the Research Grants Program Office at the UC Office of the President.

Health psychology Professor Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook and incoming grad student Jessica Marino have a new study suggesting that the breastmilk of mothers who have recovered from COVID-19 contains strong antibodies to the virus.

Physics Professor Bin Liu has received a CAREER award for his research into a new micromanipulation technique to virtually hold freely moving microorganisms, essentially creating a “bacterial treadmill” to enable biological and medical studies of microorganisms in their natural state.

He is the 24th researcher from UC Merced and the fifth from the Department of Physics to win this recognition from the National Science Foundation.

Professor Michael Thompson doesn’t usually work in immunology or drug development. But his use of X-ray crystallography — research that visualizes the structures of protein molecules to better understand how they function — has taken him in a new direction.

About 35 percent of Americans have metabolic syndrome, a group of risk factors that raises the risk of cardiovascular disease — the leading cause of death in the United States.

If you have three of these five issues, you have metabolic syndrome, according to the American Heart Association:

About 70 percent of people with COVID-19 suddenly lose their sense of smell, although fewer of them seem to realize it, according to a new “living analysis” by a research team that includes a UC Merced graduate student.

Biophysical chemistry Professor Shahar Sukenik and the graduate students in his lab are trying to make sense out of what might seem to some to be chaos. They aim to better understand how a series of floppy, malleable proteins function — or malfunction — inside cells.

The work has earned Sukenik a $1.86 million, five-year Outstanding Investigator award from the National Institutes for Health (NIH).

A new coalition of universities and community partners across the state — including UC Merced —aims to address the COVID-19 pandemic in communities that are disproportionally affected.