Applied Mathematics

Undergraduates Victoria Arias and Cydney Caradonna entered UC Merced through different doors.

Arias was a freshman impressed with the campus and community. Caradonna was a transfer student and athlete sold on UC Merced’s championship women’s basketball team.

UC Merced’s Graduate Division will host its Grad Slam competition on April 18 with graduate scholars presenting on topics ranging from Valley Fever immune response and antibiotic resistance to computer vision and mathematical methods for thermal collection. This year’s competition started in March with 30 graduate students in the qualifying round, from which the judges narrowed the field to the top 12.

The campus’s 2019 Grad Slam semi-finalists are:

The majority of people who die by suicide do so with firearms, and there were more firearm suicides in America in 2017 than there were homicides committed by any method. Combined.

Those shocking numbers from the FBI and American Foundation for Suicide Prevention are the impetus for two UC Merced professors from very different disciplines to join forces to try and predict who is most likely to commit suicide using a gun.

UC Merced is partnering with UC Santa Barbara and two California State University campuses — Fresno and Channel Islands — on a project to create a more diverse STEM faculty at colleges and universities nationwide.

The quartet has been awarded a total of $2 million from the National Science Foundation’s Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program for a joint research project intended to increase the number of underrepresented minority faculty members in STEM fields.

The goal is to develop a model that’s applicable — and replicable.

The dynamics of blood coagulation, evolution of language and carnivore foraging strategies were just a few of the many topics discussed at the third annual Central Valley Regional Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Student Chapter Conference held on the UC Merced campus April 27.

When Mario Banuelos was 12, his mother took him into the fields to tie grape vines.

The labor was tough and the wages were meager. After just one day on the job, Banuelos knew that his path in life would be different. He worked even harder in school and earned nearly straight As. His efforts paid off when he was selected for the prestigious Gates Millennium Scholars program.

For the first time, UC Merced’s doctoral programs in the sciences have been ranked among the best in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report’s 2019 edition of Best Graduate Schools.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that they have selected former Dean of the School of Natural Sciences and Applied Mathematics Professor Juan Meza as the new Division Director for the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS).

Meza was selected from a pool of highly qualified candidates after a nationwide search. His appointment was based in part on his original contributions to the field of mathematical sciences, his demonstrated leadership in academia and his record of achievement in research administration.

Imagine going to see the latest Pixar movie. You’re sitting in the theater enjoying the film, when you begin to notice the astounding level of detail in the animation. On screen, water is rippling and leaves are flittering with an almost uncanny realism. It’s art imitating life with incredible verisimilitude, and it makes you wonder how the animators are able to pull off such lifelike effects.

Professor Noemi Petra is UC Merced’s newest recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award, which the NSF describes as its “most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their organizations.”