School of Social Sciences Humanities and Arts

A new grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will create a pipeline to doctoral degrees in biomedical and behavioral sciences at the University of California, Merced, for underrepresented minority students from California State University, Fresno.  

Like their colleagues in science and engineering, researchers in UC Merced’s School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts are keeping busy this summer with a wide variety of projects.

Among them:

UC Merced researchers won four of only 11 seed grants given out by the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) for the year.

CITRIS received 24 highly competitive proposals from the four CITRIS campuses: UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Merced and UC Santa Cruz. The 11 proposals receive an average of $55,000 each for a total of $600,000 in interdisciplinary research funds. The winning proposals include work that will use data analytics to optimize health care, communications and agriculture applications.

Climate scientist Emmanuel Vincent noticed climate change discussions in Europe had become somewhat politically polarized before he left France a few years ago, and found the same situation on a larger scale when he came to America.

UC Merced developmental psychologist Eric Walle recently discovered a link between walking and talking in infants. This development, however, brought up additional questions. Was the link specific to culture? Age? Native language?

One of the things that attracted Chelsea Coe to UC Merced as an undergraduate student was the opportunity to do research.

Researcher Makenzie Provorse parlayed her passion for computational chemistry into a position as UC Merced’s second Chancellor’s Postdoctoral fellow.

As a runner up for the Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship — a 31-year-old program enhanced with more money for hiring incentives recently by UC President Janet Napolitano — her application was referred back to the campus for the chancellor’s fellowship, and ranked highest among all applicants at UC Merced.

Baltazar Cornejo is poised to become a strong and tireless advocate for the Central Valley, thanks to a fellowship program that provides real-world experience in state government. 

When students walk across the stage at this weekend’s commencement ceremonies at the University of California, Merced, they will join the nearly 4,000 scholars who have earned degrees from the university, while marking yet another campus milestone as the campus’s 10th graduating class.

For senior Jessica Nguyen, UC Merced has fueled more than academic preparedness — it has sparked her fervent interest in civic leadership.