What’s new at UC Merced this fall? Just about everything. There are new people, new places, new things -- and a renewed thriving aura of anticipation and excitement among faculty, students and staff.
New people
Though final figures won’t be released until early October, about 2,700 will start classes Tuesday, Aug. 26, and close to 900 of them are brand-new to the university and nearly 200 are here pursuing graduate studies.
More than 1,000 of those students moved in to campus housing last Friday, 250 of whom are the first residents in the brand-new freshman dorm, Mariposa Hall.
UC Merced welcomes 19 new faculty members, who bring their wealth of expertise in various disciplines. As we launch our fourth academic year, we see more and more results emerging from the groundwork of our previous years.
On the administrative side of the house, clinical psychologist James “Fuji” Collins joins the staff as assistant vice chancellor for student health and wellness. The search for the founding director of the UC Merced Early Childhood Education Center concluded successfully with the hiring of Danielle Waite. Waite, a UC Berkeley alumna who also holds a Master’s degree from St. Mary’s College, is planning for the center as construction begins. The center is scheduled to open in early spring 2009 with a capacity of about 80 children.
New places
The Yablokoff-Wallace Dining Center Expansion was also completed this summer. Those remaining on campus watched as its glass walls letting in the light and beckoning hungry faculty, staff, students and visitors. The expansion is open for the fall semester with new seating, a landscaped terrace and an organic herb garden whose products will be used in campus cuisine.
The edible organic garden isn’t the only notch in UC Merced’s environmental belt, as it works hard to live up to its mission of leading best practices in sustainability. Sierra magazine has placed the University of California's 10 campuses "in a league of their own" in the Sierra Club publication's second annual green college guide, which hit newsstands Aug. 21.
UC Merced’s intercollegiate athletics initiative launched July 30 with an initial meeting on campus including Los Angeles Galaxy coach and former soccer player Cobi Jones, athletic administrators, former student athletes, other UC Merced representatives and community supporters. This group will guide a consulting team hired by the university to create a strategic athletics plan.
The campus broke ground July 21 on its fourth academic structure, the Social Sciences and Management Building. Scheduled for completion in 2010, the new building will house the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts as well as the planned Ernest and Julio Gallo School of Management.
On the topic of renovation, the third floor of the Classroom Building is barely recognizable. The installation of workstations and the addition of modular academic buildings next to the Classroom Building have provided much-needed office space for our new faculty hires, postdoctoral and graduate students.
New things
As announced Aug. 13, charitable gifts and private grants to UC Merced during the 2007-08 fiscal year increased by more than 70 percent, to nearly $10.6 million. About 950 individuals, corporations and charitable foundations contributed to the total, the university said, up 23 percent compared to a year ago. The average gift per donor was $11,156, while the largest was $2 million.
Bioengineering professor Kara E. McCloskey was included in the recent announcement of approved New Faculty Awards from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. McCloskey will receive $2.2 million from CIRM, funding her efforts to induce stem cells to become heart cells that could be used to help patients whose hearts have been damaged in heart attacks or other cardiac disease incidents.
UC Merced received a Major Facilities Grant from CIRM earlier this year to establish a Stem Cell Instrumentation Foundry, which will provide stem cell researchers at UC Merced and throughout California access to advanced instruments, techniques and collaborators for single-cell analysis.
With all the new people, places and things on campus this semester, UC Merced is sure to be bustling with activity. Check our homepage often for news on the latest events, findings and gifts that make the UC system’s newest research university a center of academic excellence.
