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.

Who will UC Merced’s Grad Slam champion be?

Cheer on the finalists on April 8 and find out.

Graduate students from UC Merced’s three schools will take the stage to compete in the Graduate Division’s 10th Grad Slam finals.

In a thick rainforest in Papua New Guinea, they're tracking bats. Researchers glue radio transmitters to the creatures’ little, furry bodies, then wait. And wait. When a bat flits to another position, the humans sprint through the foliage, stop and take a reading.

It’s 1 a.m. The researchers will do this all night, running from spot to spot, triangulating the bats’ movements. Logging data.

Having a blast.

“It’s just fun, right?” Betsy Dumont said, recounting a moment lived on the way to becoming one of the world’s top bat biologists. “It’s hard and it’s fun.”

UC Merced graduate students Anuvetha Govindarajan and Jocelyn Ornelas-Munoz have each received a $25,000 fellowship from SandboxAQ, which creates solutions at the nexus of artificial intelligence and quantum technology — or AQ — to address some of the world's greatest challenges.

Professor Shahar Sukenik has been a faculty member for only 5 1/2 years, but he has already built an impressive resume, becoming a leader in his research field, an innovator and an exceptional communicator.

Those qualities helped him become UC Merced’s first recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Sloan Research Fellowship.

Department of Physics Professor Kinjal Dasbiswas has received a CAREER award for his work on the theory and modeling of shape-changing active solids.

He is the 38th researcher from UC Merced to earn this award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Rocks, from ponderous boulders to tiny grains of sand, are subject to the whims of moisture, weather and time as they tumble from surrounding slopes into rivers, pools and lakes.

Distinguished Professor Martin Hagger from the Department of Psychological Sciences has been awarded one of this year’s Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher awards.

Graduate student Samuel Leventini comes from a long line of educators, and the tribology researcher thinks he might want to follow in those footsteps.

Thanks to a new supplemental grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Leventini will get the opportunity to find out if teaching is really the path for his life.

UC Merced is part of several new initiatives aimed at increasing the accessibility and inclusivity of data science studies and opening new opportunities for historically underserved students after graduation.

New grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy (DOE) and the California Learning Lab are funding collaborations with a sister campus and several community colleges as well as the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) to accomplish these goals.