Grants

Physics Professor Daniel Beller has received a CAREER award for his research into how complex organization arises from simple physical interactions for biological cells or polymers assembled in large numbers.

He is the 26th researcher from UC Merced and the sixth from the Department of Physics — and the second this year — to earn a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

A new community health project addressing asthma issues in the San Joaquin Valley is underway thanks to a collaboration between UC Merced, UCSF and Camarena Health, supported by a grant from biotechnology giant Genentech.

A new community health project addressing asthma issues in the San Joaquin Valley is underway thanks to a collaboration between UC Merced, UCSF and Camarena Health, supported by a grant from biotechnology giant Genentech’s foundation.

A character in a very famous movie about a great white shark once said all sharks do is “swim and eat and make little sharks.”

It turns out they do much more than that. Sharks have roamed Earth’s oceans for more than 400 million years, quietly recording the planet’s history.

Two new projects designed and led by UC Merced researchers will address challenges facing many Californians — wildfire recovery and agricultural labor — but will also have global reach.

Professor Tao Ye and colleagues have received a $1.18 million grant from the Department of Energy to study how DNA molecules can arrange themselves into nanostructures that could form the basis of nanoelectronic circuits.

About 35 percent of Americans have metabolic syndrome, a group of risk factors that raises the risk of cardiovascular disease — the leading cause of death in the United States.

If you have three of these five issues, you have metabolic syndrome, according to the American Heart Association:

One of the biggest challenges in managing crops, especially in large fields, is knowing how much water each section of a field needs. Determining that accurately is a cumbersome process that requires people to hand-pluck individual leaves from plants, put them in pressure chambers and apply air pressure to see when water begins to leak from the leaf stems.

That kind of testing is time consuming and means that farmers can only reach so many areas of a field each day and cannot test as frequently as they should.

Biophysical chemistry Professor Shahar Sukenik and the graduate students in his lab are trying to make sense out of what might seem to some to be chaos. They aim to better understand how a series of floppy, malleable proteins function — or malfunction — inside cells.

The work has earned Sukenik a $1.86 million, five-year Outstanding Investigator award from the National Institutes for Health (NIH).

Since 2007, UC Merced researchers have been extremely productive in the Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory (CZO), delving into investigations of hydrology, climate change, geology, biology and more.

But the National Science Foundation, which funded the CZOs, is decommissioning the sites and has reconfigured the program around themed research clusters in a new program called the Critical Zone Collaborative Network (CZCN).