Environmental Research

In a move that will save the campus money, improve campus safety and help save the environment, Professor Jason Hein set up a new solvent purification system.

This project is similar to his previous efforts to reduce hazardous waste generated by his lab by capturing and recycling acetone.

A five-year CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation is helping Professor Alberto Cerpa develop the next big breakthrough in wireless sensor networks – an autonomous, self-learning system that uses its own energy wisely.

Working to map every square inch, UC Merced master’s student Andrew Zumkehr found there are 111 million acres of abandoned farmland in the United States.

That’s a lot of space for growing biofuels that could replace between 5 percent and 30 percent of the United States' primary energy or liquid fuel demands, he said.

Using some of the tiniest fossils in the world to help clarify how climate change is modeled has earned Professor Jessica Blois a big honor – publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

From the microbes in the guts of living things to the idea of life elsewhere in the universe, Professor Marilyn Fogel is pondering some of life’s deepest questions.

When and how did life originate on Earth? What does the future hold for our planet? Are we alone in the universe?

“When you go back through time, there are bits and scraps of life everywhere,” Fogel said. “It’s ubiquitous.”

Sustainability being a campus hallmark, it’s no surprise the UC Merced campus takes Earth Day very seriously, even though the events planned are fun.

Each April 22, people around the country mark Earth Day, which began in 1970 and is seen by many as the start of the modern environmental movement.

As everyone knows, space is limited on the UC Merced campus.

But with a little money and a lot of persistence, Engineers for a Sustainable World has found a way to carve out a little room for a community garden.

The theory that temperature limits how far up in the mountains trees can grow looks like it’s true, but not in the way researchers had expected.

Working with Professor Lara Kueppers, UC Merced postdoctoral researcher Andrew Moyes’ examination of how warmer temperatures affect alpine-area trees has been published in the international journal Oecologia.

Researchers at the university in your backyard are delving into issues of great importance to the San Joaquin Valley, the state, the nation and the world.

You can learn more about their work at the eighth annual UC Merced Research Week, from March 4 through 8, on campus and in downtown Merced.

Research at UC Merced encompasses cancer; diabetes; climate change; water, soil and air quality; water availability; nanotechnology and robotics; history; mapping; archaeology; human genes; and much, much more.

Graduate student Sharon Patris likes spending time at a lake in the middle of the forest on an uninhabited island in the western Pacific.

The marine lake named Ongiem’l Tketau and informally known as Jellyfish Lake, is home to the golden jellyfish, a species Patris studies as part of her work with UC Merced School of Natural Sciences Professor Michael Dawson in Palau.