Graduate Students

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.

The best way to explore what UC Merced has to offer is to visit the campus and see it firsthand.

Cognitive and Information Sciences at UC Merced will be the top program represented this summer at the discipline’s premiere conference, Cognitive Science.

Working to map every square inch, UC Merced master’s student Andrew Zumkehr found there are 111 million acres of abandoned farmland in the United States.

That’s a lot of space for growing biofuels that could replace between 5 percent and 30 percent of the United States' primary energy or liquid fuel demands, he said.

Graduate student Stephanie Huette knew she would face challenges at UC Merced.

This year isn’t the first time Maxine Umeh-Garcia has walked across the commencement stage at the University of California, Merced. She was part of the campus's graduating class in 2010.

But this time will be markedly different. Umeh-Garcia is receiving a master’s degree in quantitative and systems biology, and she will represent the Class of 2013 at one of two commencement ceremonies scheduled for May 18 and 19.

Born in central Mexico, the sea has long fascinated graduate student Jose Pablo Vazquez-Medina.

Now, he's hoping to figure out some of its secrets.

Tyler Shaddix’s house looks like most of the other houses on his block in a subdivision not far from the UC Merced campus.

It’s what’s inside that’s different – the home office of a startup company offering a web service that has, in less than a year, become very popular with government agencies, large companies and universities across the country and around the world.