Research Excellence

While the COVID-19 pandemic has kept most students and faculty mentors off campus, UC Merced’s commitment to providing research experiences to undergraduate students has not wavered.

Over the past 14 years, the Summer Undergraduate Research Institute (SURI) has become an integral part of the research training for many students. Each summer, SURI scholars spend nine weeks performing academic research alongside faculty mentors in their disciplines.

California counties with high numbers of low-wage workers are seeing higher incidence of COVID-19, suggesting a link between so-called “worker distress” and spread of the virus, according to a new study by UC Merced’s Community and Labor Center.

Maybe now more than ever, scientists need to understand the immune system.

A new National Institutes of Health grant is funding a cross-disciplinary collaboration between bioengineering Professor Joel Spencer and immunology Professor Jennifer Manilay that will allow them to watch as immune-system cells develop in the bone marrow of a living mouse to gain insights into how they work.

NASA’s fifth exploratory rover is scheduled to head for Mars later this month to try and answer key questions about the potential for life on the red planet.

Before the rover leaves Earth, current and former members of UC Merced’s Fundamental Tribology Lab conducted critical tests that will provide key information for the mission’s success.

The Merced nAnomaterials Center for Energy and Sensing (MACES) —UC Merced’s NASA-funded center for nanomaterials-based research and education — has received a two-year, $1.8 million renewal from the federal space agency.

Continuing to build on the research already underway, Professor Jennifer Lu, the center’s director, said the next two years will see a focus on energy-materials research for space exploration.

Every Fourth of July, the Carnegie Corporation of New York honors the legacy of its founder Andrew Carnegie, by recognizing an extraordinary group of immigrants, who are now naturalized American citizens, and who have made notable contributions to the progress of American society.

Theoretical physics Professor Ajay Gopinathan has been working over the past decade to model a submicroscopic mystery. Now, he and a team of colleagues have verified an important piece of the puzzle of how tiny, intrinsically twisted protein filaments responsible for repairing and growing cells know where to go to perform their function.

The work could someday enable scientists to control bacterial growth.

About 4.5 billion people around the globe do not have access to adequate sanitation, and what they do have — typically pit latrines and lagoons — are responsible for widespread illnesses and a portion of the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.

UC Merced Professor Rebecca Ryals and a group of colleagues have a solution that not only increases safety, sustainability and jobs, but reduces greenhouse gas emissions and waste-borne illnesses while producing an effective fertilizer for agriculture.

UC Merced’s Graduate Division wrapped up its annual Grad Slam competition this week, announcing Physics doctoral candidate Boe Mendewala as its campus champion.

The judges awarded two runners-up, Shayna Bennett, a third-year Ph.D. student in Applied Mathematics, and Melinda Gonzales, a first-year Ph.D. student in Environmental Systems.

The San Joaquin Valley — with all its agriculture and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that go with it — is one of the places most at risk because of changing snowmelt patterns, a new study shows.