School of Natural Sciences

The theory that temperature limits how far up in the mountains trees can grow looks like it’s true, but not in the way researchers had expected.

Working with Professor Lara Kueppers, UC Merced postdoctoral researcher Andrew Moyes’ examination of how warmer temperatures affect alpine-area trees has been published in the international journal Oecologia.

Researchers at the university in your backyard are delving into issues of great importance to the San Joaquin Valley, the state, the nation and the world.

You can learn more about their work at the eighth annual UC Merced Research Week, from March 4 through 8, on campus and in downtown Merced.

Research at UC Merced encompasses cancer; diabetes; climate change; water, soil and air quality; water availability; nanotechnology and robotics; history; mapping; archaeology; human genes; and much, much more.

Graduate student Sharon Patris likes spending time at a lake in the middle of the forest on an uninhabited island in the western Pacific.

The marine lake named Ongiem’l Tketau and informally known as Jellyfish Lake, is home to the golden jellyfish, a species Patris studies as part of her work with UC Merced School of Natural Sciences Professor Michael Dawson in Palau.

A UC Merced professor is one of five finalists in an international challenge that could win him a $50,000 research grant and free access to a record-setting, ocean-going robot.

Professor Michael Beman, with the School of Natural Sciences, entered the PacX Challenge, a competition designed to encourage scientists and students to make use of data gathered by autonomous wave glider that just completed a 9,000-nautical-mile journey across the Pacific Ocean.

Editor's Note: As of mid-February, UC Merced's graduate student applications increased by 6.6 percent over last year. This press release reports a 41 percent increase, which at the time (Jan. 18) was an accurate figure. The current figure is lower.

The small-scale, cutting-edge work of graduate student Eric Josephs and chemistry Professor Tao Ye is providing an up-close look at the behavior of biomolecules.

Professor Carolin Frank is concerned with the inner lives of trees.

She looks inside them to see whether microbes are part of – and perhaps even critical to – life functions such as growth.

Professor Christine Isborn is doing quantum chemistry at the speed of graphics.

Counting the number of species that live in the Earth’s oceans sounds as impossible as counting the grains of sand on a beach.

But a global collaboration involving a UC Merced researcher and a graduate student is doing just that, and found that about a third of all the oceans’ species are still undescribed.

That doesn’t mean they cannot be counted, though.

More than two dozen UC Merced undergraduates spent the summer exploring a tiny but hot topic — materials 100,000 times slimmer than a human hair that are poised to revolutionize sensing, data collection and other technologies.