Graduate Students

Graduate student Ryan Lucas is living a mountain-lover’s dream through his research.

As part of engineering Professor Martha Conklin’s meadows-hydrology lab, he gets to spend a lot of time in the Sierra Nevada in Yosemite and Sequoia-Kings Canyon national parks, collecting data on how much water is flowing through the meadows, how it’s moving and by what process.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of California, Merced, has begun an ambitious quest to discover common principles that guide evolution of structures at the linguistic and molecular levels.

Professors Rick Dale in cognitive science, David Ardell in evolutionary biology and Suzanne Sindi in applied mathematics will spend the next three years conducting research that employs computational and mathematical models as well as human data to see what kind of fundamental similarities and differences they can find.

A fall census shows enrollment at the University of California, Merced, has reached 6,195 students — a 7 percent increase over last year — as the campus continues to grow in both numbers and competitiveness.

After evaluating a record application pool of more than 18,000, the university enrolled 1,757 new undergraduate students for the 2013 fall semester. The freshman class jumped by nearly 11 percent, from 1,495 to 1,654 — making it the largest freshman class in the campus’s history. In addition, the campus added 103 transfer students and 101 graduate students.

People routinely encounter familiar components from everyday life in new combinations, such as when a co-worker takes on a new role or a sentence uses a word in a new way.

We typically excel at interpreting these new experiences, but researchers do not yet understand the neurological basis of this phenomenon. How does the brain assemble new ideas from familiar parts?

Adapting technology that has become the standard in the automotive, aerospace and air-conditioning industries, Professor Gerardo Diaz has designed and is testing the next generation of solar-collecting units at UC Merced.

As the Rim Fire continues to burn in and around Yosemite National Park, a former UC Merced student’s work related to the fire burned up the Internet this week.

Paul Doherty, the first Yosemite park ranger to complete a doctoral degree at UC Merced, graduated in the spring and now works as a public safety technology specialist for Esri, a company that provides GIS mapping for a variety of applications.

The University of California, Merced, kicks off its 2013-14 academic year today with the largest and most diverse class of incoming freshmen, the largest contingent of graduate students, the largest total enrollment and the largest body of faculty members in its history, the university said today.

It has been four years since Mike Oliveira earned his bachelor’s degree in bioengineering at UC Merced, but the campus still feels like home to him.

The ties between the community and the University of California, Merced, will grow stronger thanks to a gift from longtime campus supporters Joel and Elizabeth Wallace.

The Wallaces have given UC Merced $575,000 to establish the Wallace-Dutra Amphitheater and the Yablokoff-Wallace Health Science Research Endowment, which will support the campus’s Community Research, Innovations and Solutions for the Health of the San Joaquin Valley Network (CRIS).

Just because it’s summertime doesn’t mean research at UC Merced comes to a halt.

Just the opposite.

This summer, professors and students at all levels are conducting a variety of research projects on campus, off campus, in the oceans and forests and around the world.

Up in Yosemite National Park, for example, nine undergraduate students are getting a summer experience to last them a lifetime, conducting research with faculty researchers from UC Merced, scientists from the U.S. Geologic Survey and from the park.