Patty Guerra

A team from UC Merced has been selected to participate in the Department of Energy (DOE) "BattChallenge," a three-year competition to develop a battery for an electric vehicle.

Understanding and conserving biodiversity, or the variety of life in ecosystems, is key to sustaining life on Earth.

A research project funded by NASA that is launching this week in South Africa, co-led by UC Merced environmental engineering Professor Erin Hestir, is aimed at better understanding the biodiversity of the region and providing new mapping tools that could be used on a global scale.

Water is the most valuable resource in the world. And it's a particularly important commodity in the Central Valley, historically a desert but also home to some of the richest agricultural soil on Earth.

The UC Merced Library and Secure Water Future co-hosted an event to discuss water policy in California, its history and what the future might look like.

Writing is still the most important, and most-used, form of communication in the world.

"Writing is crucial in that it's both a product and a process. It's in the fabric of what we do," said Paul Gibbons, teaching professor of writing studies at UC Merced. "Writing is a way of doing things in the world, of asking for things. It's still a major coin of the realm."

The new feature film "A Million Miles Away" is a universally relatable story of resilience and achievement, depicting Jose Hernández's journey from working the fields of the San Joaquin Valley to fulfilling his life-long dream of being a NASA astronaut.

But it's also a story with a very personal tie to UC Merced. Hernández, who went on to head an aerospace company and operate a vineyard, is a graduate of the University of California system and serves on the UC Board of Regents, and his son Antonio is a student at UC Merced.

UC Merced researchers will tackle climate changes in multiple ways through more than $4 million in grants recently awarded from within the university.

The Office of Research and Economic Development (ORED) issued nine awards totaling $4,096,197 for proposals that range from studying methane gas emissions to making electronic vehicles more accessible to people.

Three UC Merced researchers have recently received the prestigious Hellman Fellowship.

Computer science and engineering Professor Shijia Pan, economics Professor Briana Ballis and life and environmental sciences Professor Xuan Zhang have all been named Hellman Fellows.

Dozens of UC Merced students took their oaths as members of the College Corps recently. The program, which provides stipends to students in exchange for working with community partners, is in its second year.

The second cohort of UC Merced's College Corps was sworn in Sunday, Aug. 28.

It's more than just a way to help these students pay for college, explained Assistant Vice Chancellor for Student Engagement Brian O'Bruba, who administered the oath. It's an opportunity to develop a service mindset that will last a lifetime.

UC Merced public health Professor Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young has been awarded an R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The $3 million grant will fund Young's ambitious, five-year research project to understand how immigration policy influences health care access and the well-being of Latinos in rural California and Arizona counties, including Merced, Tulare, Imperial, Monterey and Napa.

UC Merced Computer Science and Engineering Professor Xiaoyi Lu is leading a collaboration that secured a $4.35 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) to improve federated machine learning systems.