UC Merced physics graduate student Sameen Yunus has been awarded a prestigious fellowship allowing her to spend the next three years working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, conducting experiments and simulations that could lead to faster fusion ignition.

The UC-National Lab In-Residence Graduate Fellowship is designed to help graduate students complete their theses. Yunus, a third-year Ph.D. candidate, will work on experiments that complement her computational work in Professor David Strubbe’s lab.

Vice Chancellor for Research, Innovation and Economic Development Gillian Wilson has been named a 2024 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals.

Being elected an AAAS Fellow is one of the most prestigious honors awarded by the association. Wilson is one of only eight astronomers honored this year.

The night sky is filled with countless mysteries and worlds yet to be explored but that someday might be visited by spacecraft.

In a free event titled “Celestial Tales: Stars, Exoplanets and the Myths That Connect Us,” on March 6, the campus community and the public will hear from Professor Yosuke Yamashiki and student Yukiko Morishita from Kyoto University, discussing constellations and the search for exoplanets.

Humanities education has been under fire on college campuses over the past decade.

“There’s a lot of concern nationally about graduate education in the humanities. We’re producing plenty of Ph.D.s but are there enough jobs for them upon graduation?” said anthropology and heritage studies Professor Robin DeLugan, who leads UC Merced’s Research Center for Community Engaged Scholarship (ReCCES).

“How do we make a humanities career more feasible?”

Distinguished Professor Emeritus Roland Winston, a pioneer in solar energy, engineering and physics, died Feb. 8 at the age of 88 at his home in Merced.

A founding faculty member in the schools of Natural Sciences and Engineering at UC Merced, Winston also founded and directed the intercampus collaborative Advanced Solar Technologies Institute, known as UC Solar.

His research and teaching focused on concentrating solar energy systems. Winston published hundreds of articles in scientific journals, co-wrote several books and held more than 50 patents.

Faculty members at UC Merced are taking the lead on four Multicampus Research Program Initiatives (MRPI), working with colleagues around the University of California system to address challenges around labor and agriculture, active matter, Indigenous health and fusion energy.

A group of faculty members at UC Merced has been awarded a $1 million seed grant from the National Science Foundation to form a research collaborative to expand participation and access to materials, research-focused facilities, education, training and careers.

A group of UC Merced researchers modeled predation behaviors, as well as changes in those behaviors, among large carnivores, developing a new theory that will help biologists assess the health of various ecosystems.

Persistence has paid off for UC Merced doctoral candidate Arabi Seshappan.

The graduate student from Fremont, about to start her sixth year, was selected for the Fulbright U.S. Student Program's Fulbright-Université Paris-Saclay Doctoral Research Award, which is only granted to three U.S. students each year.

A group of researchers, including physicists from UC Merced, has made discoveries about the mechanics of blood clots that could help in the development of biomaterials for tissue engineering and improved surgical adhesives.

Many materials around us, including those in cells and tissues, are made of networks of elastic fibers that resist deformation. These biological fibrous networks determine the fine balance between health and disease.