Faculty

Vice Chancellor for Research, Innovation and Economic Development Gillian Wilson has been named a 2024 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals.

Being elected an AAAS Fellow is one of the most prestigious honors awarded by the association. Wilson is one of only eight astronomers honored this year.

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When David Mendoza-Cózatl, a 2006 Pew Latin American fellow in the biomedical sciences, got an email soliciting applications for the Pew Innovation Fund, he sprang into action.

The Biology Integration Institute (BII): The Institute for Symbiotic Interactions, Training and Education in the Face of a Changing Climate, or INSITE, stands out because it is supported by $12.5 million from the National Science Foundation, one of the largest NSF grants UC Merced has ever received.

This story is part of a series for Black History Month. Read more stories highlighting Black excellence at UC Merced.

The brutal deaths of African Americans George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and others at the hands of police officers five years ago catalyzed for Black communities to unite globally and reignite the Black Lives Matter movement.

Humanities education has been under fire on college campuses over the past decade.

“There’s a lot of concern nationally about graduate education in the humanities. We’re producing plenty of Ph.D.s but are there enough jobs for them upon graduation?” said anthropology and heritage studies Professor Robin DeLugan, who leads UC Merced’s Research Center for Community Engaged Scholarship (ReCCES).

“How do we make a humanities career more feasible?”

Physiology Professor Rudy M. Ortiz has been named this year's winner of the A. Clifford Barger Underrepresented Minority Mentorship Award by the American Physiological Society.

The UC Merced professor was recognized for his leadership, guidance and mentorship of underrepresented minority and diverse groups of students in the physiological sciences.

Distinguished Professor Emeritus Roland Winston, a pioneer in solar energy, engineering and physics, died Feb. 8 at the age of 88 at his home in Merced.

A founding faculty member in the schools of Natural Sciences and Engineering at UC Merced, Winston also founded and directed the intercampus collaborative Advanced Solar Technologies Institute, known as UC Solar.

His research and teaching focused on concentrating solar energy systems. Winston published hundreds of articles in scientific journals, co-wrote several books and held more than 50 patents.

Faculty members at UC Merced are taking the lead on four Multicampus Research Program Initiatives (MRPI), working with colleagues around the University of California system to address challenges around labor and agriculture, active matter, Indigenous health and fusion energy.

Measurements and data collected from space can be used to better understand life on Earth.

Lockdowns. Social distancing. Shuttered schools and businesses. The COVID-19 pandemic and its sweeping disruptions set off a stampede of “what it’s doing to us” research, focused largely on schoolchildren. How were students’ academics affected? Their mental health? Their social development?

Left unexamined was whether the pandemic impacted the social cognition of preschool children — kids younger than 6 — whose social norms were upended by day care closures and families sheltered at home.