Health

Student researchers in experimental physics Professor Jing Xu’s lab have played a critical role in a study that will help understand Alzheimer’s and other diseases that progressively destroy brain tissue.

It's time for the campus and the community to celebrate UC Merced’s high-level research during Research Week, March 6 through 10.

The annual research showcase, hosted by the Office of Research and Economic Development, kicks off with a Health Sciences Research Institute (HSRI) event titled “Climate, Environment and Health: Impacting the San Joaquin Valley and Beyond.”

After transferring from a Sacramento community college to UC Merced in 2007, Maxine Umeh-Garcia was unsure of her future career. She admits she hadn’t looked at the majors the newest UC offered before applying and imagined she’d teach high school math.

She met with her academic advisor and learned the campus offered an applied mathematics major, not pure mathematics. They discussed other options and came to a stalemate.

A new landmark study by the UC Merced Community and Labor Center shows farmworkers across California are facing serious health challenges on a daily basis.

The goal of the Farmworker Health Study was to examine agricultural worker health and well-being, in addition to health care access, local and state policies, and health and training needs.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has given Professor Stephanie Woo the CAREER award to help her delve into congenital birth defects by looking at the embryonic cells of zebrafish.

Woo is the 32^nd researcher from UC Merced to earn a CAREER award.

For the first time, UC Merced faculty members from each of the campus’s three schools have been chosen as principal investigators on some of the 21 exciting new projects that are being funded through UC’s Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI).

In addition, UC Merced researchers are collaborating on 10 of the other projects.

UCs Merced and Santa Cruz became the newest campuses in the system to be named an agricultural experiment stations (AES), UC President Michael Drake announced at today’s Regents’ meeting.

They are the first campuses in more than 50 years to earn the designation.

The 2022 report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change warns that global health is at the mercy of fossil fuels. An accompanying policy brief states that an estimated 32,000 people in the U.S. died due to air pollution in 2020 alone; 37% of those deaths were directly related to fossil fuels.

When it functions correctly, inflammation protects the body from infection and injury. But when it becomes chronic, inflammation is linked to health problems such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, arthritis and bowel diseases, including Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis.

Rising juniors this fall will have an unprecedented opportunity for stem cell research training that could lead directly to careers in stem cell science after graduation.