Graduate Students

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.

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.

UC Merced rose into the top 100 of the U.S. News & World Report rankings of National Universities earlier this month, and the university already has another milestone to celebrate.

According to numbers released today (Sept. 24), UC Merced’s total student enrollment has surpassed 9,000 for the first time. The 9,018 students enrolled for the Fall 2020 semester — which is being administered through remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic — include more than 8,276 undergraduate students and 742 graduate students.

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.

Forest restoration is often associated with mitigating wildfire risk and improving ecosystem health throughout the Sierra Nevada. But restoration also dramatically affects water use within forests and the amount of runoff that flows downstream.

As scientists build smaller and smaller machines, they need to understand the invisible forces that make those machines work.

Thanks to research and the initiative of then-UC Merced graduate student Jake Pate, some of those forces can now be measured and manipulated.

UC Merced is rapidly gaining a strong reputation for research and scientific computing across many disciplines and a major expansion of its computing infrastructure is about to cement the campus’ status as a research computing hub.

It is said that rainforests are the Earth’s lungs, capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, building it into lush vegetation and releasing oxygen and water back into the air.

Wildfire seasons are intensifying because of climate change. That means reforestation efforts will increase, making it important for scientists and resource managers to understand how to make sure restorations will thrive in the future.

University of California President Janet Napolitano has selected UC Merced student organization RadioBio as one of two recipients for the 2020 President’s Award for Outstanding Student Leadership.

RadioBio, a science podcast that discusses topics ranging from molecules to ecosystems, was created in 2016 by graduate students to increase access to research in the sciences.