Research Excellence

Humanities education has been under fire on college campuses over the past decade.

“There’s a lot of concern nationally about graduate education in the humanities. We’re producing plenty of Ph.D.s but are there enough jobs for them upon graduation?” said anthropology and heritage studies Professor Robin DeLugan, who leads UC Merced’s Research Center for Community Engaged Scholarship (ReCCES).

“How do we make a humanities career more feasible?”

National Parks are magnificent landscapes where the public can go for sightseeing and recreation. They also are research labs - gorgeous, awe-inspiring and wild research labs, to be sure. And the science conducted there can help ensure that the parks' natural beauty will be available for generations of people to come and enjoy, and also support local and national issues calling for sustainable management.

Researchers at UC Merced examined the relationship between science and the parks and how both can serve each other better.

Exploring sources of historical narratives can take you to places where walls seem to move and truth feels fluid and interchangeable. Ma Vang’s research has focused on how people narrate their histories, tracking the lived experiences of people pigeonholed or marginalized by dominant narratives that privilege the record and written text.

An online workshop this week aims to deconstruct one of humanity’s most destructive traits: genocide.

UC Merced’s Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences is bringing together an interdisciplinary panel of scholars for “Understanding Genocide: Neural, Psychological and Political Science Perspectives.” The workshop will be shown live on YouTube from 9 a.m. to noon Friday, May 17.

It was a groundbreaking Tuesday night so there were shovels. Many shovels. Full sized, posterized, miniaturized (in a gift box). All to mark a symbolic turning of earth for UC Merced’s Medical Education Center.

The tools also evoke something Dr. Kenny Banh said nearly a year ago. A top administrator at UC San Francisco's Fresno campus, he was talking about San Joaquin Valley PRIME, a program that prepared students from the Valley for a medical career. Training included at least a year in the Bay Area.

UC Merced’s Nicotine and Cannabis Policy Center has earned multiyear funding to continue its mission to embolden community partners and share policy-influencing data in the long battle against the pervasive use of tobacco and other inhalants in underserved San Joaquin Valley and foothill populations.

Much of the work Yue (Jessica) Wang does at UC Merced sounds like science fiction: She creates flexible material that gets stronger the more you hit it. And it conducts electricity.

Science, yes. Fiction, no.

This work is happening. It was featured in a presentation materials scientist Di Wu from the Wang lab delivered this spring at the American Chemical Society meeting in New Orleans.

In Professor Xuecai Ge ’s lab, where UC Merced researchers study how cells talk to each other to develop and differentiate, a recent surprise discovery is lending insight as to how erroneous cell signals lead to disease and birth defects.

Ge and her colleagues zeroed in on a slice of the communication system, the primary cilia, and found a protein called Numb, which they didn’t expect to be there.

Numb facilitates development of the spinal cord and cerebellum during embryonic neurodevelopment.

The National Science Foundation awarded a team, led by principal investigators Professor Ajay Gopinathan and Carrie Kouadio, funding to establish a summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program at UC Merced.

This new program seeks to increase the diversity of the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) research community.

Fernando Malagon and his mom stood at the head of a line for guided tours of the university he plans to attend this fall. The informational stroll around UC Merced would be more for her than for him; he visited the campus five years ago on a seventh-grade field trip from Modesto.

Of course, the university has grown since then, not just in square footage but in opportunity and possibility.