Research Excellence

Following the Mission to Improve Valley Health Care

May 15, 2024

UC President Michael Drake signs a white coat to celebrate an important milestone for UC Merced's Medical Education Building.

It was a groundbreaking Tuesday night so there were shovels. Many shovels. Full sized, posterized, miniaturized (in a gift box). All to mark a symbolic turning of earth for UC Merced’s Medical Education Center. The tools also evoke something Dr. Kenny Banh said nearly a year ago...

A man wearing safety goggles adjusts a laser apparatus with a screwdriver.

Study: Quantum Vibrations Could Help Detect Nuclear Threats

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...

Study: Climate Change, Drought Threaten Giant Sequoias

A new study published online in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences finds that the giant sequoia, a fixture of California’s Sierra Nevada forests for the past 2.6 million years...

Professor Florin Rusu and graduate student Weijie Zhao pose in front of patterned panes of glass.

Computer Scientists Aid in Major Astronomical Discovery

In a major advance in astronomy, scientists announced last month that they had observed two neutron stars colliding, a never-before-seen cosmic event that made headlines the world over — and...

UC Merced Joins Effort to Help Make Research Accessible to All

Open access is a publishing model premised on the idea that scholarly research should be freely accessible to anyone with internet access. UC Merced has staked its claim as a member of the open...

Electron micrograph of crumpled sheets of molybdenum disulfide.

Crumpled Nanosheets Could Help Produce Clean Energy

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...

Cognitive Scientists Find Links Between Jazz, Speech and Whale Songs

Jazz musicians riffing with each other, humans talking to each other and pods of killer whales all have interactive conversations that are remarkably similar to each other, new research reveals....

Professor Clarissa Nobile wearing a blue lab coat, teal-colored gloves, and safety goggles leans against a bench in her laboratory.

Another First for Nobile: NIH Outstanding Investigator Award

Professor Clarissa Nobile is changing the way we look at microbes. She wants to understand them as they’re found in nature, not as they exist in the laboratory. And she was just awarded a five-...

Interdisciplinary Collaborations Broaden Archaeology Research

Archaeologists have been asking where high-elevation populations came from for decades; how they are going about answering the question, however, is new. “Fifty years ago, I would have...

Professor Michael Dawson (seated) with graduate student Karly Higgins (left) and postdoctoral researchers Dannise Ruiz-Ramos (center) and Lauren Schiebelhut.

NSF Grants Will Help Unravel Mysteries of Sea Stars, Jellyfish

The National Science Foundation recently awarded Professor Michael Dawson $900,000 to study some rather mysterious marine phenomena. Dawson received $700,000 — part of a three-year, $1.2...

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