School of Engineering

Graduate student Vicky Espinoza shared the plight of some San Joaquin Valley families with a wide audience this spring in her role as a Next Generation delegate to this year’s Chicago Council on Global Affairs Global Food Security Symposium, entitled “From Scarcity to Security: Managing Water for a Nutritious Food Future.”

It’s before dawn on a Saturday morning in mid-May — not a time anyone would expect the UC Merced campus to be busy. But it is.

This is Spring Commencement, and there is much work to do.

Parking and transportation staff are placing signage and temporary fencing. In the kitchens, dozens of dining and catering workers are preparing breakfast for thousands of people, including the police officers and transportation employees who will spend the morning guiding traffic, answering questions and maintaining order.

UC Merced’s Graduate Division will host its Grad Slam competition on April 18 with graduate scholars presenting on topics ranging from Valley Fever immune response and antibiotic resistance to computer vision and mathematical methods for thermal collection. This year’s competition started in March with 30 graduate students in the qualifying round, from which the judges narrowed the field to the top 12.

The campus’s 2019 Grad Slam semi-finalists are:

Two of the state’s leading political figures will make their return to UC Merced to serve as keynote speakers at the university’s 14^th commencement exercises in May.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom, California’s First Partner, and Eleni Kounalakis, the state’s first female Lieutenant Governor, will address more than 1,300 graduates and their families over two ceremonies May 18-19. The Class of 2019 will be the largest in UC Merced’s history.

Two UC Merced Ph.D. students took to the State Capitol yesterday with representatives from the other UC campuses to advocate for the importance of the research being done across California.

Climate change is having a profound effect on the millions of migrating birds that rely on annual stops along the Pacific Flyway as they head from Alaska to Patagonia each year.

They are finding less food, saltier water and fewer places to breed and rest on their long journeys, according to a new paper in Nature’s Scientific Reports.

UC Merced’s graduate programs in engineering had a strong showing in U.S. News & World Report’s 2020 edition of Best Graduate Schools, released today.

Overall, UC Merced’s School of Engineering is ranked No. 134 in the nation, after debuting at No. 140 in 2015.

It’s estimated that a leaf-cutter ant colony can strip an average tree of its foliage in a day, and that more than 17 percent of leaf production by plants surrounding a colony goes straight into their giant, fungus-growing nests.

It’s no wonder these ants are considered the smallest recyclers on the planet and are referred to as "ecosystem engineers" by scientists because of the effects they have on the environment around them.

This year’s Research Week, March 4-8, promises more community connections than ever before.

Research Week , sponsored by the Office of Research and Economic Development, focuses on the research conducted at UC Merced that fosters the development of students and faculty and extends growth from within the campus to the global academic community.

Climate change and wildfire make a combustible mix with deadly and costly consequences.

Scientists have been trying to understand that link for many years, studying the effects of climate and wildfire interactions in the Sierra Nevada.

UC Merced Professor LeRoy Westerling and University of New Mexico Professor Matthew Hurteau and colleagues have analyzed data via simulations of Sierra wildfires, and what they found was surprising.