Molecular and Cell Biology

This is part of a series of profiles of new UC Merced Bobcats enrolled for the fall 2026 semester.

Tayven Tipler won’t travel far from his hometown when he starts at UC Merced and he is already well along on his higher education journey. Tipler completed several courses at Merced College as a high school student.

Where I come from: I live in Atwater, where I was born and raised. I graduated this spring from Buhach Colony High School. 

The W.M. Keck Foundation has awarded UC Merced nearly $1.8 million in new grants that fuel ambitious research and give early-career scientists a crucial boost at a pivotal stage of their careers.

One of the nation’s most prominent private supporters of basic science, the Los Angeles–based foundation is directing $600,000 to a newly launched bridge funding initiative designed to protect faculty and doctoral researchers from disruptions in federal grant support. An additional $1.2 million will propel the laboratory research of chemistry and biochemistry Professor Andy LiWang.

Editor's note: This story is republished from the Spring/Summer 2026 issue of UC Merced Magazine.

Omar DeGuchy remembers the moment he left the comfort of UC Merced — the place he’d found his footing — and stepped onto what some call “the smartest square mile on Earth.” He defended his Ph.D. dissertation in applied mathematics remotely in 2020 and started a job at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

Students who arrive at UC Merced planning on specific careers often discover along the way that their interests — and strengths — are broader than they first imagined.

A new initiative called Education Tracks, or EdTracks, is designed to give students a flexible, low‑risk way to explore careers in education without delaying graduation or adding significant cost.

Our circadian clocks play a crucial role in our health and well-being, keeping our 24-hour biological cycles in sync with light and dark exposure. Disruptions in the rhythms of these clocks, as with jet lag and daylight saving time, can throw our daily rhythms out of whack.

But a group of researchers is getting closer to understanding how these clocks operate.

UC Merced biochemistry Professor Andy LiWang and his colleagues have solved how the circadian clocks in microscopic bacteria precisely control when different genes are turned on and off during the 24-hour cycle.

The same cellular renewal that keeps our bodies healthy might also fuel the growth of cancer. A UC Merced biologist has found that the brain could hold the key to stopping it.

Department of Molecular and Cell Biology Professor Chris Amemiya, former interim director of the Health Sciences Research Institute, has been honored by the Pan American Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology (PASEDB) with the Service Award.

The National Institutes of Health are backing Professor Clarissa Nobile ’s mission to understand the mechanisms by which microbes form biofilms, specifically those that can be hazardous to human health.

Two UC Merced graduate students and an alum from the School of Natural Sciences were recently awarded fellowships from the highly competitive National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

This year, NSF awarded 1,000 GRFP fellowships compared to about 2,000 in previous years.