School of Social Sciences Humanities and Arts

Some people have the idea that the arts are being shortchanged as UC Merced grows.

The Global Arts, Media and Writing Studies (GAMWS) Program is here to correct that perception with its inaugural Arts Week, set for March 4-9.

“We want to draw people to campus and show them what we are about and what we are doing,” ethnomusicology Professor Jayson Beaster-Jones said.

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.

For Merced native Tessa Provins, the opportunity to attend UC Merced for her graduate education was a chance to come home again — but it wasn’t simply the familiar location that drew her to the campus.

Provins earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford University in 2013 before pursuing her graduate education at UC Merced. She completed a master’s degree in 2016 and a Ph.D. in political science in 2018.

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.

In some ways UC Merced is still a blank canvas, even 13 years after opening.

But that just gives this year’s artist in residence Otto Rigan more room to dream as he helps devise a master arts plan for the campus.

“I think the campus is beautiful,” Rigan said, “but it’s missing the unexpected…the voice of the arts. If there had been an arts plan in place all along, art could have been integrated as new buildings emerged.”

Psychology Professor Eric Walle ’s Interpersonal Development Lab will recruit local infants and mothers as an important and unique part of a large-scale study focusing on the development of young children.

Led by scientists at New York University and Pennsylvania State University, the Play and Learning Across a Year (PLAY) project involves 65 researchers across the United States and Canada and is funded by a $6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

The genomes of ancient Andean settlers reveal a complex picture of human adaptation, including when they became able to digest starches and how evolutionary modifications allowed them to live at such high altitudes.

A new paper co-authored by UC Merced Professor Mark Aldenderfer illuminates the changes that took place between initial settlement and the 16th-century colonial period.

If you’re an American with Internet access, you’ve probably done it. You get a headache, a sniffle or a mystery bruise, and instead of seeing your doctor, you consult “Dr. Google.”

According to some studies, more than 80 percent of Americans have used the Internet to “self-diagnose” health issues. UC Merced public health communication Professor Susana Ramirez’s new partnership with an eHealth startup aims to help people get quality information and find out what they do with it once they have it.

UC Merced is part of a concerted effort to dramatically increase diversity in physics and astronomy over the next five years.

The campus is one of nine University of California campuses and 15 California State University campuses awarded a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation through the Cal-Bridge North program.

A new grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will help UC Merced further diversify its community of graduate students and faculty, beginning with the humanities and humanistic social sciences.