Faculty

Biophysical chemistry Professor Shahar Sukenik and the graduate students in his lab are trying to make sense out of what might seem to some to be chaos. They aim to better understand how a series of floppy, malleable proteins function — or malfunction — inside cells.

The work has earned Sukenik a $1.86 million, five-year Outstanding Investigator award from the National Institutes for Health (NIH).

UC Merced’s Graduate Division provides many programs throughout the year to ensure students succeed academically, including faculty and peer mentoring programs, free tutoring, and social and well-being activities to help foster a sense of belonging and community.

The coronavirus has impacted everyone in different ways and three public health professors are examining specifically how rural, Latinx communities in California have been affected in a new study funded by the University of California Office of the President.

A new coalition of universities and community partners across the state — including UC Merced —aims to address the COVID-19 pandemic in communities that are disproportionally affected.

Students and faculty worked with a record number of schoolchildren from Merced, the Bay Area and southern California all the way to Washington, D.C., enriching their learning and increasing their interest in science, technology, engineering and math.

Molecular biology Professor Chris Amemiya and his former graduate student Molly Phillips have made a discovery that upends traditional ideas about a structural polysaccharide called chitin that is found in some fish.

School of Engineering professors Roger Bales and Martha Conklin have written a new article for The Conversation discussing the changes that need to be undertaken in land-management practices in California's mountain forests:

Since 2007, UC Merced researchers have been extremely productive in the Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory (CZO), delving into investigations of hydrology, climate change, geology, biology and more.

But the National Science Foundation, which funded the CZOs, is decommissioning the sites and has reconfigured the program around themed research clusters in a new program called the Critical Zone Collaborative Network (CZCN).

Bird species usually are counted twice a year by wildlife surveyors: once during the breeding season and again during the Christmas Bird Count .

New technology, however, is increasing the accuracy of bird population studies. A team of UC Merced researchers is developing a model to recognize bird calls.

It has been two years since UC Merced received the $280,000 Henry Luce Foundation grant, but its community engaged research endeavors are far from over.

This fall, UC Merced Interdisciplinary Humanities graduate students and faculty will have the benefit of two additional years of funding to find new opportunities to grow intersections of humanities research and community engagement in Merced.