Faculty

About 4.5 billion people around the globe do not have access to adequate sanitation, and what they do have — typically pit latrines and lagoons — are responsible for widespread illnesses and a portion of the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.

UC Merced Professor Rebecca Ryals and a group of colleagues have a solution that not only increases safety, sustainability and jobs, but reduces greenhouse gas emissions and waste-borne illnesses while producing an effective fertilizer for agriculture.

As the SPACEX Crew Dragon spacecraft left Earth today to ferry two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, many Bobcats were watching the live stream with keen anticipation.

It’s not just that the flight marks the first time a commercial aerospace company will carry humans — two NASA astronauts — into Earth's orbit. The collaborative project also has special meaning for UC Merced.

Despite the challenges of making an in-person event into a remote one, students in this year’s Innovate to Grow spring showcase displayed the determination, passion and innovation Bobcats are known for.

UC Merced’s Graduate Division wrapped up its annual Grad Slam competition this week, announcing Physics doctoral candidate Boe Mendewala as its campus champion.

The judges awarded two runners-up, Shayna Bennett, a third-year Ph.D. student in Applied Mathematics, and Melinda Gonzales, a first-year Ph.D. student in Environmental Systems.

The San Joaquin Valley — with all its agriculture and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that go with it — is one of the places most at risk because of changing snowmelt patterns, a new study shows.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has altered many things this spring on the UC Merced campus — from classes and research to events — UC Merced is making sure the Class of 2020 has a forum to commemorate students’ achievements and successes.

UC Merced will host the University of California’s first-ever virtual commencement ceremony Saturday, May 16, to recognize the more than 1,500 candidates who have registered to participate.

“Songs that Never End,” Professor Yehuda Sharim’s intimate film about a family transitioning from Iran to life in Texas, is a finalist contender in the International Documentary Film Festival Vienna and will stream on the festival’s site for one week starting Thursday.

Innovation is nothing new at UC Merced, but this year, because of the coronavirus pandemic, everyone on campus has had to reimagine nearly everything they do.

But leave it up to the School of Engineering to wholly reinvent its annual Innovate to Grow showcase and competition on the fly.

A UC Merced researcher and her lab have unlocked one of the mysteries that could lead to treatments — or even cures — for prion diseases in mammals.

Prion diseases are a family of rare, progressive neurodegenerative disorders that affect both humans — such as with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or fatal familial insomnia — and animals, such as mad-cow disease. These disorders are usually rapidly progressive and always fatal, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Kathryn “Katie” Daniels was a teen when she attended the celebration of the opening of UC Merced. As a child growing up in Merced, Daniels had heard her parents stress the importance of education.

“My mom always talked about the University of California coming to Merced and how that was going to help us,” she said.

Daniels is the first member of her family to have earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Soon, she’ll add her doctorate in Sociology.