Research Excellence

UC Merced has received a $12.5 million grant funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop the Biology Integration Institute (BII): INSITE — the INstitute for Symbiotic Interactions, Training and Education — a research collaborative that aims to expand the fundamental knowledge of symbioses and inform immediate and long-term conservation strategies in the face of climate change.

Professor Maggie Sogin is one of 20 faculty members nationwide to receive the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) inaugural Building Research Capacity of New Faculty in Biology (BRC-BIO) award.

As one of the leaders for sustainability and equity, UC Merced hosted the first offsite meeting for the Governor’s Strategic Growth Council (SGC) last week.

The mission of the council is to coordinate and work collaboratively with public agencies, communities and stakeholders to achieve healthy, thriving and resilient communities for all Californians.

Starting this fall, undergraduates interested in the biomedical sciences will have an opportunity to take part in a new and innovative training program that will give them strong foundations in computational biology, systems biology and big data analytics.

Mechanical thinning of overstocked forests, prescribed burning and managed wildfire now being carried out to enhance fire protection of California's forests provide many benefits, or ecosystem services, that people depend on.

UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow Hannah Palmer, Ph.D., was named as the 2022-23 Congressional Science Fellow by the Geological Society of America (GSA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and will spend a year in Washington, D.C., working for a member of Congress or a congressional committee beginning in September 2022.

Green energy solutions are critical to meet current and future power demands, and while solar and wind power are great, they are also site-specific and intermittent.

Distinguished Professor Roland Winston was among the first eight faculty members at UC Merced in 2003, two years before the campus opened. When he retires July 1, at age 86, he will be the first of those eight to leave — but his work on solar energy applications will continue.

It's not hyperbolic to say Winston is a really big deal in the worlds of physics and solar energy.

For the first time, UC Merced has partnered with local higher education institutions for a two-day symposium dedicated to education research findings from the Central Valley.

Bioengineering Professor Victor Muñoz and his lab have created a new way to solve some of the mysteries among an increasingly important class of proteins that don’t appear to have any specific structures but serve very important functions, including the complex genetic processes that separate high-order organisms from single-cell bacteria.

They call it “molecular LEGO,” pulling the proteins apart and rebuilding them, segment by segment.