Graduate Students

The annual day of giving at UC Merced — Give Tue UC Merced (#GiveTueUCM) — presents many opportunities for donors to help students and programs.

Every opportunity is equally worthwhile because #GiveTueUCM is ultimately about supporting student success, but everyone has their favorite causes.

During this year’s Give Tue UC Merced annual 24-hour campaign of giving, participants will have more options to which to direct their support, including a new fund that assists with the emerging and unique needs of student groups as the campus grows.

National security and a beautifully resonant violin have found a surprising link — a classic experiment in acoustics, recently replicated at the quantum scale as part of a collaborative project on quantum-enhanced motion sensing.

Very few people will admit to an abiding love of statistics. But Emanuel Alcala, a second-year public health doctoral student, believes statistics are key to solving many of the San Joaquin Valley’s public health challenges.

“I grew fond of statistics when I started working at the Central Valley Health Policy Institute,” Alcala said. “I saw firsthand how statistics could impact people.”

UC Merced is welcoming back its first alumni keynote speaker, Shavone Charles, to address December 2017 graduates at its first Fall Commencement ceremony on Dec. 16.

In a major advance in astronomy, scientists announced last month that they had observed two neutron stars colliding, a never-before-seen cosmic event that made headlines the world over — and two UC Merced computer scientists were instrumental in making it happen.

Zach Petrek, a second-year doctoral student in chemistry and chemical biology, can usually be found running experiments in the laboratory of his advisor, Professor Tao Ye. But this summer, he did something different — he went to NASA.

Petrek was one of seven UC Merced students to intern at NASA over the summer, an opportunity provided through MACES, the Merced nAnomaterials Center for Energy and Sensing.

Topics ranging from ethnobotany, public health and feminism to agriculture, urban growth and social movements are among the highlights of the Mesoamerican Studies Center’s upcoming conference at UC Merced.

If you’ve ever wondered why people stand where they do on the political spectrum, science might have at least part of the answer: People can be biologically predisposed to certain feelings toward politics and society.

A new paper lead-authored by UC Merced graduate student Chelsea Coe indicates that physiological factors can predict how someone will react when presented with political scenarios — an idea that demonstrates an emerging area of study, the intersection of biology and politics.

UC Merced’s Homecoming Oct. 20-22 will draw students, staff, faculty, alumni, family and friends together for a weekend of activities that highlight the campus and the community.