Graduate Students

MERCED, Calif. — UC Merced honored the Pacific Gas and Electric Company with the School of Engineering’s inaugural Vanguard Award today with a special ceremony to thank the company for all it has done for engineering students.

“PG&E is honored to receive the inaugural Vanguard Award from UC Merced’s School of Engineering,” said PG&E President Chris Johns. “More than that, we’re proud to contribute to the foundations of this university — a diverse and environmentally minded campus that’s shaping the leaders and innovators of tomorrow’s energy workforce.”

As UC Merced’s new energy manager, it’s Varick Erickson’s job to watch every kilowatt hour used on campus and identify ways to save them.

“It’s a lot like rummaging around in the couch and looking for change,” Erickson said.

Except the spare kilowatt hours he finds could save the campus hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Editor's Note: As of mid-February, UC Merced's graduate student applications increased by 6.6 percent over last year. This press release reports a 41 percent increase, which at the time (Jan. 18) was an accurate figure. The current figure is lower.

The small-scale, cutting-edge work of graduate student Eric Josephs and chemistry Professor Tao Ye is providing an up-close look at the behavior of biomolecules.

Counting the number of species that live in the Earth’s oceans sounds as impossible as counting the grains of sand on a beach.

But a global collaboration involving a UC Merced researcher and a graduate student is doing just that, and found that about a third of all the oceans’ species are still undescribed.

That doesn’t mean they cannot be counted, though.

Graduate student Kaitlin Lubetkin and several sure-footed assistants spent much of the summer in Yosemite National Park.

UC Merced is one of only seven universities nationwide to receive a grant from the Council of Graduate Schools to develop new approaches for enhancing graduate student skills for assessing undergraduate learning, and to help prepare students for future careers as university faculty members.

In addition to being the only UC campus to receive a grant, UC Merced is among prestigious company.

Zhijiang "Justin" Ye wasn’t expecting to attend the newest campus in the UC system.

He just wanted to work with Professor Ashlie Martini.

When Ye, then a student at University of Minnesota, connected with Martini and asked to join her research group, he found out she wasn’t staying at Purdue University, where he planned to earn his doctoral degree.

UC Merced will commemorate the 10th anniversary of its groundbreaking with a series of Founders Day events Oct. 25 through 27.

Professor Mónica Medina started out as the only marine biologist in a National Science Foundation workshop last year, but she ended up with a group of new partners and an opinion piece in the prestigious journal Science that’s being released today.