Research

Some scientific discoveries are a happy accident (think: penicillin). Others have been there all along, they just take a keen eye to notice, which was recently the case in Professor Joel Spencer’s lab.

An observation Spencer made during his postdoctoral appointment at Harvard University laid the groundwork for his most recent publication in PLoS ONE titled “Intravital Fluorescence Microscopy with Negative Contrast.”

Like many people this summer, Professor Shahar Sukenik has dehydration on his mind.

But it’s not the soaring outside temperatures prompting this focus. Dehydration has been a theme of his lab’s work for the past year, from understanding how seeds know when to germinate to a new grant to further knowledge about the proteins that help protect cells and organisms against irreversible drying.

The over the counter, “safe,” organic-compliant insecticides people purchase at home-improvement stores could be causing a problem that goes far beyond the vegetable garden or farm field — antibiotic resistance.

While the campus remained quieter than usual this summer, a group of new graduate students began their UC Merced journey earlier than the rest of their cohort.

It has been 186 years since Charles Darwin collected the samples of the Galapagos Islands species that led to his explanation of how the diversity of life on Earth has evolved and forever changed the way we understand the world.

During his five-week stay on the islands, Darwin collected dozens of samples, including one small, light brownish-grey snake on Floreana Island. That sample, now at the Natural History Museum in London, was the basis for describing a new species, the Galapagos (Floreana) racer.

The University of California Office of the President awarded three out of only seven UC-Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Initiative grants to UC Merced faculty members.

The initiative has fostered faculty partnerships with HBCUs to support enhanced diversity and representation of Black scholarship in graduate education and the professoriate since 2017.

With a new $20 million federal grant, UC Merced becomes part of a multi-institutional research collaborative to develop artificial intelligence — or AI — solutions to tackle some of agriculture’s biggest challenges related to water management, climate change and integration of new technology into farming.

Every time you surf the web, check your credit card balance, or even sign up for a class at UC Merced, you’re using a relational database.

Relational databases are basically the back end of operating software, aggregating information and culling results based on your search or query. Improving the speed of these results, known as query optimization, is the focus of computer science and engineering Professor Florin Rusu and his third-year graduate students Yesdaulet Izenov and Asoke Datta.

As part of its commitment to inclusive excellence in graduate research and education, UC Merced has awarded its new Chancellor’s Fellowship for Inclusive Excellence to four incoming Ph.D. students from the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts whose studies will contribute to the representation of Black scholars in academia and beyond.

While many are preparing to head off to college after an unprecedented year, a handful of students are already on UC Merced’s campus and working away in research labs. They’re part of the inaugural FACTS Bridge Program, a way for first-year and transfer students to get a head start on research and more.