Bioengineering

Many UC Merced students are first-generation college students, meaning they are the first in their families to pursue college degrees and the types of careers having a degree affords. UC Merced’s strong relationships with industry partners plays a key role in helping students navigate these career paths. A new partnership between the School of Engineering and OMRON Robotics and Safety Technologies will help students find opportunities in the robotics field.

UC Merced’s NSF-CREST Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Machines (CCBM) has been awarded an additional $5 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue its mission. In total, the NSF has invested $10 million in the center, an indicator of the importance of the Center’s work and its faculty, student and staff contributions.

Shortly before the fall semester kicked off in person, 11 students were wrapping up their first summer on campus as part of the FACTS summer bridge program.

FACTS stands for San Joaquin Valley Food and Agriculture Cyberinformatics Tools and Science. The six-week summer course, funded by the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture, introduces students to the world of research in agricultural science and technology.

Some scientific discoveries are a happy accident (think: penicillin). Others have been there all along, they just take a keen eye to notice, which was recently the case in Professor Joel Spencer’s lab.

An observation Spencer made during his postdoctoral appointment at Harvard University laid the groundwork for his most recent publication in PLoS ONE titled “Intravital Fluorescence Microscopy with Negative Contrast.”

COVID-19 upended life as we know it, especially among the science community. While some scientists rushed to develop a vaccine, others sought a better understanding of the virus, hoping to predict where the next outbreak might be in order to better contain it. At UC Merced, this included testing the campus’s wastewater.

UC Merced’s campus has many buildings, but just one pipe through which wastewater leaves the campus. This turned out to be helpful to discern whether there would be forthcoming positive COVID-19 test results.

Proteins operate like biological machines, regulating nearly every major function and organ in our bodies through a still-mysterious shape-shifting process. Bioengineering graduate group chair Professor Victor Muñoz has a new $1,082,356 award from the National Science Foundation to unlock those mysteries.

You can’t avoid seeing grazing cattle in California’s Central Valley, where UC Merced has its own pastured cows on campus. Now imagine if those cows were kept secluded without the use of a fence, or at least not one visible to the eye.

Immunology Professor Jennifer Manilay and bioengineering Professor Joel Spencer are using a new grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to expand a project they’ve been working on for the past two years — delving into the immune systems of living mice to see how B-cells develop under different circumstances.

From graduate student Jose Zamora’s perspective, the CREST Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Machines (CCBM) has been a spectacular success.