Latinos suffer from some of the highest obesity rates in the nation. Health officials have tried to intervene with messaging that encourages healthy eating and healthy behavior, but these campaigns have met with little success.

The American Public Health Association (APHA) presented public health Professor Susana Ramirez with the 2017 Early Career Award at its annual meeting last month.

Very few people will admit to an abiding love of statistics. But Emanuel Alcala, a second-year public health doctoral student, believes statistics are key to solving many of the San Joaquin Valley’s public health challenges.

“I grew fond of statistics when I started working at the Central Valley Health Policy Institute,” Alcala said. “I saw firsthand how statistics could impact people.”

Topics ranging from ethnobotany, public health and feminism to agriculture, urban growth and social movements are among the highlights of the Mesoamerican Studies Center’s upcoming conference at UC Merced.

UC Merced recently launched a new standalone Ph.D. program in Public Health, further establishing the university’s commitment to educating the next generation of scholars who are addressing the San Joaquin Valley’s unique health concerns.

The School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts (SSHA) previously offered a Ph.D. in social sciences with an emphasis in public health, but this optional track within the Social Sciences Graduate Group was never a standalone program.

UC Merced’s branch of the Blum Center for Developing Economies rebooted this spring with a faculty-led effort to spend two years working on becoming the hub for all food-security-related research and outreach on and off campus.

Part of that effort includes seed grants for UC Merced researchers. The Blum Center just announced this year’s winners:

The National Cancer Institute’s “cancer moonshot” tasks researchers with, among advancing other new biotechnologies, delving into immunotherapy and epigenomic analysis.

The depth and breadth of post-diagnosis care for cancer patients often depends on the resources available to them.