Faculty

Graduate students face a number of unique challenges as they embark on the life-changing journey of earning their master’s or Ph.D. Adjusting to graduate studies, achieving work-life balance and dealing with imposter syndrome are just a few.

At UC Merced, graduate students have a new ally in Maria Nishanian, who on Dec. 1 became the university’s first graduate academic counselor.

Chia Thao was a teenager when she arrived in Fresno with her family to begin a new life. She was born in a refugee camp in Thailand, where her Laotian parents had fled after the Vietnam War.

“Our parents brought a skillset to the U.S., found a home in the Central Valley and began farming,” Thao said. “This connected them back to their homeland.”

Over the years, she witnessed the challenges small-scale farmers faced and it prompted her research interests. Now, she is using her cultural knowledge of her community to help improve health outcomes.

Not spending money on gas, oil changes, and tune-ups and not producing harmful greenhouse gas emissions is enough to sell many people on plug-in electric cars.

But many consumers won’t bite until they’re assured that electric cars can go the distance before needing a charge.

Proteins are miniscule machines inside the body, about 10,000 times smaller than the thickness of human hair. They control all the processes of life — like how cells communicate to each other, how the immune system combats infection, how muscles contract, and how oxygen is picked up in the lungs and delivered to those very same muscles.

UC Merced’s iconic Beginnings sculpture represents arms reaching out to embrace students as they embark on a higher education journey filled with wonder, excitement and joy.

Those same feelings embody the holiday season, and students, faculty and staff gathered last week for the ceremonial lighting of the sculpture. The annual tradition, now in its third year, helps ring in the holiday season with cookies and hot chocolate and a DJ playing popular holiday tunes.

A pair of UC Merced researchers are combining computational chemistry and machine learning principles to solve what seems to be an intractable problem at the heart of quantum mechanics: predicting the movement of electrons, also known as electron dynamics.

Like many young women, Calista Lum absorbed the message that she was not as capable as her male peers when it came to science, technology, engineering and math.

Teachers in her Fairfield high school engineering classes often asked if male classmates had done her work for her.

“I just assumed the boys were so much better at it than me,” she said.

UC Merced Professor Peggy O’Day hopes to improve water quality in the California Delta by studying local wetlands.

O’Day is leading a new three-year study of Merced County wetlands that drain into the San Joaquin River and eventually the Delta.

Professor Jing Xu and her students study extremely tiny motor proteins, but their work could make a huge contribution to the growing body of knowledge about Alzheimer’s and other diseases that progressively destroy brain tissue.

When Denzal Martin started his undergraduate work at UC Merced, he wasn’t thinking about a career in physics, interning with NASA or attending graduate school.

The Los Angeles native was studying computer science and engineering. One day, though, he decided to attend a materials science and engineering lecture by visiting NASA scientist Cheol Park.

“It was a very obscure subject to me, but I was interested to learn more,” Martin (’18) said. “The pictures he showed — it seemed like magic how they were fabricating these materials.”