Academic Distinction

Starting this fall, the Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences is offering an honors program for undergraduate students.

Each student who is majoring in cognitive science and enrolled in the program will conduct research for a year and produce an honors thesis before they get a bachelor’s of science or arts degrees with the honors designation.

Admission is selective. Students must meet the GPA requirement and have proposed a research project that a current faculty member has approved.

The University of California Board of Regents has appointed University of California, Merced graduate student Josiah Beharry to be the 2024-25 student Regent.

Beharry is the 50th student Regent, a position established in 1975. He will serve as the student Regent-designate for the coming year, able to participate in all deliberations, and will have voting privileges when his one-year term as a Regent begins in July 2024. Beharry's appointment carries additional significance, as he is the first student from the UC Merced campus to serve as student Regent.

Each year, faculty members are specially recognized by their peers in the Academic Senate for a variety of accomplishments.

This year’s Academic Senate awards honor faculty from across the three schools for their outstanding teaching, research, impacts on their fields and mentorship, as well as their dedication to diversity and scholarly public service in the 2022-23 academic year.

Professor Roberto Andresen Eguiluz has received a CAREER award for his research into the underlying cause of arthritis.

He is the 33rd researcher from UC Merced to earn a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

To ensure the youngest students are ready for the K-12 education system, UC Merced is leading a joint effort to attract and prepare more transitional kindergarten (TK) teachers to serve in classrooms in the Central Valley and across California.

UCs Merced and Santa Cruz became the newest campuses in the system to be named an agricultural experiment stations (AES), UC President Michael Drake announced at today’s Regents’ meeting.

They are the first campuses in more than 50 years to earn the designation.

UC Merced continues to build a national reputation for its academic distinction and research excellence.

For three consecutive years, UC Merced has been ranked in the top 100 national universities by U.S. News & World Report. The 2023 list released this morning (Sept. 12) placed the campus at No. 97 overall among national universities, No. 42 for overall public universities and No. 15 in R2 universities.

UC Merced is No. 49 in the United States and No. 23 among public universities in the latest Washington Monthly college rankings recognizing the institutions progress and increasing prestige.

It is also No. 23 “Best Bang for Your Buck” in the western United States.

The magazine released its 2022 rankings this week. The rankings are based on publicly available federal data and focus largely on outcomes for students at 442 national universities, such as social mobility and college loan debt, along with research excellence.

Undergraduates will have a new, one-of-a-kind class they can sign up for this fall — Climate Justice — a hybrid course that features lectures by faculty from all 10 UC campuses.

Twelve of UC Merced’s graduate programs and one of its schools are among the best in the country in the U.S. News & World Report 2023 Best Graduate Schools rankings, according to results released March 29.