Research Excellence

Covering the 4,000 miles of California’s water canals could save billions of gallons of water and generate renewable power for the state every year, according to a new study.

Physics Professor Dustin Kleckner has received a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award for his research — the third in his department this year. He studies how optical and acoustic binding controls interactions between/among particles and how it manipulates them into self-organizing structures.

In the long term, this research aims to enable fundamentally new types of materials for industrial, defense and consumer applications.

Physics Professor Daniel Beller has received a CAREER award for his research into how complex organization arises from simple physical interactions for biological cells or polymers assembled in large numbers.

He is the 26th researcher from UC Merced and the sixth from the Department of Physics — and the second this year — to earn a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

COVID-19 has left the food insecure population especially vulnerable. The pandemic has upset food supply chains and in turn, access to healthy and nutritious food has become even more difficult. A cadre of public health professors are lending insight into how the food shortage has specifically impacted the Latinx community.

The question: What happens when UC Merced holds Research Week in the middle of a pandemic? The hypothesis: An annual, weeklong presentation of ground-breaking work reaches a big, new virtual audience.

With the Research Week’s usual in-person seminars, tours and showcases untenable because of COVID-19, the event will be accessed primarily through Zoom. Instead of attendees coming to campus March 1-5, Research Week is coming to them.

Bioengineering Professor Arvind Gopinath received a CAREER award for his research that seeks to understand how living biological materials such as bacterial swarms and fungal biofilms colonize surfaces, respond to physical features of their environments and cause infection.

He is the 25th researcher from UC Merced to earn this recognition from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

A character in a very famous movie about a great white shark once said all sharks do is “swim and eat and make little sharks.”

It turns out they do much more than that. Sharks have roamed Earth’s oceans for more than 400 million years, quietly recording the planet’s history.

Two new projects designed and led by UC Merced researchers will address challenges facing many Californians — wildfire recovery and agricultural labor — but will also have global reach.

UC Merced’s premier experiential learning expo, Innovate to Grow (I2G), is providing students, faculty and staff with a new set of experiences to learn from this year, as the event continues in a virtual format to comply with pandemic safety guidelines.

Physics Professor Bin Liu has received a CAREER award for his research into a new micromanipulation technique to virtually hold freely moving microorganisms, essentially creating a “bacterial treadmill” to enable biological and medical studies of microorganisms in their natural state.

He is the 24th researcher from UC Merced and the fifth from the Department of Physics to win this recognition from the National Science Foundation.