Health

UC Merced may still be a young campus, but that doesn't prevent its students from striving for audacious goals. One enterprising group of students aspires to change the face of how diabetes is managed in the Merced area.

During a typical day at the Mercy Medical Center Emergency Department (ED), nurses, doctors and support staff swiftly move through the halls of the 27-room facility. Patients register and are assessed and treated for everything from fractures and lacerations to possible cardiac arrest or stroke.

But another group of individuals are working hard behind the scenes.

A relatively simple combination of naturally occurring sugars and amino acids offers a plausible route to the building blocks of life, according to a paper published in Nature Chemistry co-authored by a professor at the University of California, Merced.

Researchers at the University of California, Merced, have devoted years of hard work to finding solutions to some of the world's most challenging problems.

The campus' Office of Research has released a publication that showcases many of those solutions, from technologies that increase the efficiency of solar energy collectors to medical developments that could limit the reproduction of the hepatitis C virus or the spread of HIV to materials that could improve the performance of lithium-ion batteries.

http://www.ucmerced.edu/sites/www/files/news/images/090928-coe-grant.png" title="Maria Pallavicini, dean of the School of Natural Sciences, works with student researchers in her lab.

The University of California, Merced, and UC Davis School of Medicine announced today the first cohort of students who are expected to enroll this fall in the UC Merced San Joaquin Valley Program in Medical Education (PRIME).

The two campuses announced in September a partnership to begin educating medical students in the Valley. A gift to UC Merced from the United Health Foundation in 2006 is helping to fund the new program.

The students are:

Self-identified social smokers are less likely to try to quit and to avoid smoking for more than a month, according to a national study in the American Journal of Public Health conducted by professors at the University of California, Merced, and UC San Francisco.

The University of California, Merced, today celebrates the opening of its state-of-the-art Stem Cell Instrumentation Foundry, made possible through the support of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) and Ed and Jeanne Kashian of Fresno.

 The foundry, housed on the first floor of the Science and Engineering Building, will expand the research capabilities of UC Merced's stem cell faculty members and serve as a resource for researchers throughout the state.