Physics Professor Daniel Beller has received a CAREER award for his research into how complex organization arises from simple physical interactions for biological cells or polymers assembled in large numbers.

He is the 26th researcher from UC Merced and the sixth from the Department of Physics — and the second this year — to earn a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Shakespeare can feel stuffy and difficult to understand. Native English speakers often struggle with decoding the Bard’s works, so imagine how difficult it would be to appreciate Shakespeare if you spoke another language.

This is the challenge UC Merced’s students and faculty took on with their bilingual production of “Ricardo El Segundo,” or “Richard II.”

A new community health project addressing asthma issues in the San Joaquin Valley is underway thanks to a collaboration between UC Merced, UCSF and Camarena Health, supported by a grant from biotechnology giant Genentech.

A new community health project addressing asthma issues in the San Joaquin Valley is underway thanks to a collaboration between UC Merced, UCSF and Camarena Health, supported by a grant from biotechnology giant Genentech’s foundation.

In a record year for applicants to the entire University of California system, UC Merced has received a total of 30,105 prospective student applications among freshman and transfer students into the university — the highest number in the campus’s history. 

This comes as UC Merced hosted its largest-ever student population for fall 2020 — more than 9,000 undergraduate and graduate students.

During December, the Give to UC Merced 2020 initiative tripled the campus’s goal of raising $50,000. The final tally: $163,000 raised for a variety of campus initiatives and programs.

The fundraising initiative has traditionally been held on a single day, but in 2020 it was expanded to one month with an online focus and social media-driven effort because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The University of California announced today that it is planning for a return to primarily in-person instruction systemwide starting in fall 2021. The announcement is intended to provide prospective and current students and their families time to understand the University’s goals and plans amid the uncertainties of the pandemic.

With robust research and COVID-19 vaccines soon becoming available to students, staff and faculty, the UC continues to prioritize the health and well-being of the University community and to remain vigilant in all critical prevention efforts.

Professor Tao Ye and colleagues have received a $1.18 million grant from the Department of Energy to study how DNA molecules can arrange themselves into nanostructures that could form the basis of nanoelectronic circuits.

UC Merced’s premier experiential learning expo, Innovate to Grow (I2G), is providing students, faculty and staff with a new set of experiences to learn from this year, as the event continues in a virtual format to comply with pandemic safety guidelines.

One of the biggest challenges in managing crops, especially in large fields, is knowing how much water each section of a field needs. Determining that accurately is a cumbersome process that requires people to hand-pluck individual leaves from plants, put them in pressure chambers and apply air pressure to see when water begins to leak from the leaf stems.

That kind of testing is time consuming and means that farmers can only reach so many areas of a field each day and cannot test as frequently as they should.