Materials & Matter

The idea for a year-end event showcasing School of Engineering students’ original designs started as a scribble on the back of a cocktail napkin and culminated in the exhibition of 12 teams’ work.

Now, six years later, Innovate to Grow (I2G) has become a premier event on campus highlighting dozens of projects and drawing audiences from across campus and throughout the community to UC Merced.

Innovate to Grow (I2G), the School of Engineering’s showcase for senior capstone projects and student ingenuity in engineering and entrepreneurship, is emerging as a twice-a-year event, thanks in large part to a $50,000 donation from Wells Fargo.

National security and a beautifully resonant violin have found a surprising link — a classic experiment in acoustics, recently replicated at the quantum scale as part of a collaborative project on quantum-enhanced motion sensing.

Zach Petrek, a second-year doctoral student in chemistry and chemical biology, can usually be found running experiments in the laboratory of his advisor, Professor Tao Ye. But this summer, he did something different — he went to NASA.

Petrek was one of seven UC Merced students to intern at NASA over the summer, an opportunity provided through MACES, the Merced nAnomaterials Center for Energy and Sensing.

A new paper from School of Engineering Professor Vincent Tung has made the cover of Advanced Materials, one of the top journals in materials science and engineering, and the research could one day lead to new sources of clean energy.

On Sept. 22, MacArthur "Genius" Award winner and Stanford University bioengineering Professor Manu Prakash will deliver the keynote lecture at the first annual open house for UC Merced’s Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Machines (CCBM), a National Science Foundation Center of Research Excellence in Science and Technology (NSF-CREST).

A new study published in the journal Science may have major implications for the future of water purification.

Patricia LiWang was at an impasse.

Is it still possible to build a better mouse trap? Engineering students at UC Merced think so.

MACES, the Merced nAnomaterials Center for Energy and Sensing, held its second annual open house on April 19, showcasing student research and highlighting the center’s connection