Undergraduate Students

Kisha McGuire has discovered an opportunity to do what she loves for an institution she’s grown to care deeply about.

McGuire graduated from UC Merced in 2015 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology, and soon started a full-time staff position in the Fiat Lux Scholars Program within the campus’s Calvin E. Bright Success Center.

The explorer mentality, public health Professor Stephen Wooding said, is what sets the students of UC Merced apart from anywhere else. A willingness to try something new, to go somewhere they’d never thought possible, is a part of the Bobcat DNA.

For three students, the time they spent traveling up and down the Amazon River over winter break fully embodies this desire to explore.

This year’s Research Week, March 4-8, promises more community connections than ever before.

Research Week , sponsored by the Office of Research and Economic Development, focuses on the research conducted at UC Merced that fosters the development of students and faculty and extends growth from within the campus to the global academic community.

UC Merced has a track record of helping first-generation and underrepresented students succeed in college, earning high rankings nationally for social mobility and outperforming expected graduation rates.

As UC Merced students continue to rise above their circumstances, a Bay Area organization is producing a pipeline that helps these students begin the road to success before they set foot on the campus.

A new effort is underway to lay the groundwork for the next major development at UC Merced — a fourth school, this one with the Gallo family name on it.

The planning initiative is a faculty-led effort to create a new, transdisciplinary school that draws upon the expertise of scientists, researchers and practitioners from broad backgrounds to instill the next generations of leaders with the skills and knowledge needed to understand, design and manage complex systems.

Growing up in San Juan Bautista, Vanessa Andrade loved hanging out with her father and his collection of cars and tractors.

She spent hours in the “barn” or shop, helping change the oil in cars, playing with tools and tinkering with her grandfather’s old Allis-Chalmers tractor. So perhaps it’s no surprise that this UC Merced senior — and Chancellor’s Scholar — found her academic calling in mechanical engineering.

On Dec. 15, Andrade will participate in the university’s fall commencement ceremony. She next plans to pursue a master’s degree in mechanical engineering.

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.

It’s the crown jewel of sustainability — a platinum certification signifying all the steps to making a space sustainable have been met.

For UC Merced, platinum certification had eluded the Green Labs and Green Offices programs. That changed recently when the Office of the Chancellor achieved platinum Green Offices status and biology labs directed by School of Natural Sciences instructional lab coordinator Jim Whalen secured platinum Green Labs certification.

Forty million years after dinosaurs went extinct, one of the largest predators that ever prowled Earth’s oceans emerged, feeding the imaginations of modern scientists and the nightmares of modern movie audiences.

Megalodon — the name means ‘giant tooth’ — appeared some 23 million years ago and reigned the seas for about 21 million years. In 400 million years of shark evolution, megalodon is the most massive shark species that ever lived, growing to 60 feet long, or three times the size of the largest of today’s great whites.

It’s a startling statistic: Nearly 30 percent of UC Merced students who start their college careers in the School of Natural Sciences (SNS) switch to majors outside the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields by their second year.