Research Excellence

California’s Central Valley, famous for producing much of the food Americans eat, is also infamous for its inferior air quality and its high rates of poverty, housing insecurity and at-risk workers.

Increasing epidemiological evidence has shown a correlation between long-term exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and the incidence of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD).

Areas with severe PM2.5 pollution — including the Central Valley — are often inhabited by low-income residents who are disproportionately affected by these environmental hazards.

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.

LGBTQ2S+ individuals use tobacco and nicotine products at significantly higher rates than straight and cisgender people, research shows. Reasons can include stress and other health problems brought on by systemic and social prejudice, along with barriers to support for breaking the habit.

UC Merced and CalPride Valle Central have partnered with the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences and advocates from across the nation to develop a program to support efforts by LGBTQ2S+ people to quit smoking.

Electrical engineering and computer science Professor Pengfei Su has received a CAREER award for his research on cross-layer performance tuning to enhance deep learning model efficiency.

He is the 41st researcher from UC Merced to earn a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Many people with electric vehicles drive them to work during the day and then charge them overnight after returning home. But a simple reversal of that schedule could make it cheaper and easier to charge your electric car.

That was the conclusion reached by a team of UC Merced researchers, who recently published a paper in the Electricity Journal on "Aligning Electric Vehicle Charging with the Sun: An Opportunity for Daytime Charging?"

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.

Note: This article has been republished in part.The full article is available online .

When David Mendoza-Cózatl, a 2006 Pew Latin American fellow in the biomedical sciences, got an email soliciting applications for the Pew Innovation Fund, he sprang into action.

The first solar-over-canal project in California, which started with research at UC Merced, has begun producing electricity. Plans are now in the works to expand the technology to other areas.

A groundbreaking initiative led by faculty from seven top research universities aims to accelerate the deployment of solar arrays over California's extensive canal network.

A multimillion-dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health will fund research at UC Merced that could help cancer patients and others live longer, healthier lives.

The $3.5 million, five-year grant will fund bioengineering Professor Joel Spencer's lab, which is investigating the thymus, a key organ in the human immune system.

Each year, UC Merced dedicates a week to highlight some of the significant research being conducted at the university. Research Week is an opportunity for the wider campus and the public to see projects in various subjects.

The 2025 Research Week celebration has special significance because UC Merced recently earned R1 status from the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.