Faculty

With careful planning and a little luck, researchers found a surprising upside to hurricanes after a Category 4 storm disrupted their expedition off the coast of Mexico.

The team was able to sample the ocean right after the storm passed and found that the storms churn the ocean so powerfully and deeply — up to thousands of meters — that nutrient-rich, cold water is brought to the surface.

Two UC Merced graduate students and an alum from the School of Natural Sciences were recently awarded fellowships from the highly competitive National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

This year, NSF awarded 1,000 GRFP fellowships compared to about 2,000 in previous years.

An average of more than 1 million acres of idled farmland a year is a significant contributor to a growing dust problem in California that has implications for millions of residents’ health and the state’s climate.

With cheers, hugs and leis, more than 1,500 UC Merced graduates received a celebratory sendoff to their bright futures as a prominent keynote speaker told them to make the most of the here and now.

Hundreds of families and friends joined the graduates in three days of commencement ceremonies at the university’s Recreation Field. White picket fences lined the processional path for graduates, faculty and campus leaders of the San Joaquin Valley’s only research institution.

People don't think about dust much until it's time to clean the house, but a new report by UC researchers could raise awareness of the growing threat of dust and dust storms.

Dust affects everything from cardiovascular and brain health to traffic collisions and agricultural yield. “Beyond the Haze: A UC Dust Report on the Causes, Impacts, and Future of Dust Storms in California” details the wide-ranging impacts of dust on health, public safety, the environment and California's economy.

Cosmology Professor Anna Nierenberg has received a CAREER award for a project that will vastly improve the study of the nature of dark matter in the universe.

She is the 42nd researcher from UC Merced to earn a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Only 10 years after it began, the Ph.D. program in UC Merced’s Department of Sociology made an impressive debut in U.S. News & World Report’s latest rankings of graduate-level offerings.

The Sociology graduate program tied for No. 64 nationally, sharing the position with UC Riverside, Temple University, the University of Florida and Washington State University.

Professor Emily Jane McTavish and colleagues at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have mapped the evolution of every known bird species.

They created a complete evolutionary tree of bird species by combining data on 9,239 species published in nearly 300 studies between 1990 and 2024 and additional curated data on another 1,000 species. The resulting database can easily be shared and updated as additional studies are published.

California’s Central Valley, famous for producing much of the food Americans eat, is also infamous for its inferior air quality and its high rates of poverty, housing insecurity and at-risk workers.

Increasing epidemiological evidence has shown a correlation between long-term exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and the incidence of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD).

Areas with severe PM2.5 pollution — including the Central Valley — are often inhabited by low-income residents who are disproportionately affected by these environmental hazards.

UC Merced physics graduate student Sameen Yunus has been awarded a prestigious fellowship allowing her to spend the next three years working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, conducting experiments and simulations that could lead to faster fusion ignition.

The UC-National Lab In-Residence Graduate Fellowship is designed to help graduate students complete their theses. Yunus, a third-year Ph.D. candidate, will work on experiments that complement her computational work in Professor David Strubbe’s lab.