NSF

By 2050, the U.S. population is estimated to grow to 400 million, and the world population to 9.1 billion, requiring a 70 percent increase in global food production.

UC Merced is one of four campuses across the country uniting to meet that challenge by harnessing the power of innovation and technology to develop precision agriculture for a sustainable future.

Bioengineering Professor Victor Muñoz has answered a long-standing genetic mystery, and his research suggests that someday, bioengineers could devise ways to control gene activity — manually switching off the genes that contribute to cancer, for instance.

“If this mechanism turns out to be as powerful as we anticipate, engineering it will be relatively straightforward,” Muñoz said. “Controlling the output of genes could be done in a targeted way by new genome editing technologies such as CRISPR.”

Everyone has inflammation in their body at some point as it is a vital part of the immune system. It’s what happens when white blood cells flow to a wound, whether that is a bruise or a broken bone. Inflammation helps us heal properly and fight infections, but sometimes something in this process goes wrong and inflammation becomes chronic. This is another issue that can lead to serious diseases such as diabetes, arthritis, cancer, heart disease and many others.

Audio has become a top form of entertainment over the past several years, in large part due to the rising popularity of podcasts. UC Merced graduate students are seizing the opportunity to help improve science literacy.

A group of Quantitative and Systems Biology (QSB) graduate students started RadioBio, a science podcast that discusses biology topics, in 2016. The podcast sparked from a discussion between the students and Professor Fred Wolf during a graduate professional skills development course.

Harvesting is said to be one of the most costly and labor-intensive operations in strawberry production.

But a UC Merced engineering researcher is looking for ways to make it easier and cheaper. As part of a four-year project, Professor Reza Ehsani will explore the possibilities and benefits of people and robots picking the fruit together.

Lauren Schiebelhut credits the support and opportunities afforded to her at UC Merced with opening the door to her research career.

Schiebelhut — a first-generation transfer student from Fresno — earned a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from UC Merced in May 2009 but was uncertain about her future.

Math at UC Merced isn’t exactly like math at most other universities.

Sure, there are parabolas and equations, orders of operations and cosines, but at this campus, those lead into topics such as Mad Cow Disease, coral photosynthesis and a crab’s sense of smell.

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.

Climate change is bad news for forests, and a new study by UC Merced Professor Emily Moran demonstrates one aspect of that news.

Higher summer temperatures hurt tree seedlings’ growth and survival.

But whether that is entirely bad depends on the degree of change in the number of young trees.

Asmaa Mohamed’s enthusiasm for research is contagious. Her passion not only radiates through her words, but it is also evident in the research career she has built in her undergraduate years at UC Merced.

Mohamed was born in Egypt. In 2013, her father accepted a position as a senior medical physicist in the Merced Cancer Center, prompting her family to move to Merced. About four months before immigrating, she began to learn common words to prepare for full English immersion.