Research Excellence

A new paper from School of Engineering Professor Vincent Tung has made the cover of Advanced Materials, one of the top journals in materials science and engineering, and the research could one day lead to new sources of clean energy.

Jazz musicians riffing with each other, humans talking to each other and pods of killer whales all have interactive conversations that are remarkably similar to each other, new research reveals.

Professor Clarissa Nobile is changing the way we look at microbes. She wants to understand them as they’re found in nature, not as they exist in the laboratory. And she was just awarded a five-year, $1.89 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to bolster her efforts.

Archaeologists have been asking where high-elevation populations came from for decades; how they are going about answering the question, however, is new.

“Fifty years ago, I would have consulted other archaeologists,” UC Merced Professor Mark Aldenderfer said. “It used to be the one archeologist who led a dig with assistants. It was much more insulated. Now, you can’t answer interesting questions about the past without a team of scientists.”

The National Science Foundation recently awarded Professor Michael Dawson $900,000 to study some rather mysterious marine phenomena.

Dawson received $700,000 — part of a three-year, $1.2 million grant awarded to Dawson and collaborators at UC Santa Cruz, the University of Georgia and Cornell University — to investigate the repercussions of the 2013 outbreak of sea star wasting disease (SSWD), a marine pandemic that killed 90 percent of ochre sea stars along North America’s Pacific coast.

Imagine going to see the latest Pixar movie. You’re sitting in the theater enjoying the film, when you begin to notice the astounding level of detail in the animation. On screen, water is rippling and leaves are flittering with an almost uncanny realism. It’s art imitating life with incredible verisimilitude, and it makes you wonder how the animators are able to pull off such lifelike effects.

Professor Noemi Petra is UC Merced’s newest recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award, which the NSF describes as its “most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their organizations.”

A team of UC Merced researchers was recently awarded $100,000 from Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) to identify ways to improve drought resilience and reduce the risk of wildfire in Sierra Nevada forests.

Scientists from the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, UC Merced, UC Berkeley and the USDA Agricultural Research Service have designed the first ever wireless sensor network (WSN) capable of accurately monitoring the hydrology of large mountain river basins.

A new study published in the journal Science may have major implications for the future of water purification.