Sarif Morningstar wondered something: "What happens if I grow plants using fog?"

The UC Merced student's efforts to find an answer to that question led to a research project they got paid to conduct. That in turn led to an opportunity to study plant biology in the UC Davis Ph.D. program.

Like Morningstar, many undergraduate students at UC Merced can get paid to do research under the newly adopted Learning Aligned Employment Program (LAEP).

Bobcat Day turned out to be one of the most important days in Isabella Mitchell's life. Her experience at UC Merced's open house event in April 2022 assured her that she belonged at the newest UC campus — so much so that she submitted her Statement of Intent to Register that afternoon.

For the second year, UC Merced's Student Alumni Association (SAA) and Office of Alumni Relations have partnered to host Student Philanthropy Month in March. The monthlong initiative is dedicated to building a culture of philanthropy and awareness at UC Merced.

Materials Science and Engineering Professor Beth Nowadnick has earned a National Science Foundation (NSF) award to study materials that may provide new ways to store or process information.

Nowadnick has been collaborating for the past two years with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) scientist Sinead Griffin on the project that led to the grant, which totals $379,374.

At UC Merced, mercury is a regional challenge that student and faculty researchers have been tackling for several years. Mercury was used to extract gold during the Gold Rush in California, and the element was also mined at the New Almaden site, at one time the second-largest mercury mine in the world near today’s Silicon Valley.

While growing up in the Sacramento area, Donald Carter ('21) said he didn't see many people who looked like him pursuing higher education. As the oldest of four boys in a single-parent household, he spent most of his time setting examples instead of learning from them.

But after graduating from John F. Kennedy High School and deciding to attend UC Merced, Carter realized he could use his experiences to guide other students who may have had similar upbringings.

Cognitive and Information Sciences (CIS) Ph.D. student Ben Nguyen spent last summer working as a data analyst at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

After transferring from a Sacramento community college to UC Merced in 2007, Maxine Umeh-Garcia was unsure of her future career. She admits she hadn’t looked at the majors the newest UC offered before applying and imagined she’d teach high school math.

She met with her academic advisor and learned the campus offered an applied mathematics major, not pure mathematics. They discussed other options and came to a stalemate.

The Department of Applied Mathematics, the Applied Mathematics Graduate Program and the student chapter of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) celebrated their many successful alumni recently by holding their inaugural Distinguished Alumni event and giving the Outstanding Graduate Alumni Award to Nitesh Kumar, who graduated with his Ph.D. in 2013.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has given Professor Stephanie Woo the CAREER award to help her delve into congenital birth defects by looking at the embryonic cells of zebrafish.

Woo is the 32^nd researcher from UC Merced to earn a CAREER award.