School of Natural Sciences

Image

Babies Forage for Sounds That Contribute to Language Acquisition, Study Shows

Most people wouldn’t think physics has anything to do with baby babble and human language development. But most people aren’t Ritwika Vallomparambath PanikkasserySugasree. The graduate student, who prefers to go by her first name, specializes in computational biophysics but likes to think of herself

Image
Graduate student Jackie Shay has stepped up for the campus and students during the COVID-19 crisis.

Grad Student Aids Campus’s Move to Remote Teaching

When UC Merced began transitioning to emergency remote instruction in late March, hoping to lessen the spread of COVID-19, Jackie Shay didn’t waste any time jumping in to help her fellow teaching assistants (TA) make the shift. Teaching remotely isn’t new for Shay, a Quantitative and Systems Biology

Image
CalTeach helps address the shortage of math and science teachers through innovative programming.

CalTeach Program Helps Fill Teacher Shortage Gap

When you add UC Merced students majoring in math and science with a mentor teacher it equals real-life experience teaching in local schools. That’s one of the many goals of UC Merced’s CalTeach program, which aims to address the shortage of math and science teachers throughout the Central Valley and

Image
Electrical Engineering, within the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Graduate Group at UC Merced, was ranked No. 129 by U.S. News, up 32 places from No. 161 last year.

Six Graduate Programs Recognized by U.S. News Rankings

U.S. News & World Report has ranked six of UC Merced’s engineering graduate programs in its 2021 Best Graduate Schools rankings released today, a sign that the university’s reputation is continuing to build. “We’re particularly proud of this accomplishment given our campus is only 15 years old,”

Image

Research Reveals Collective Dynamics of Active Matter Systems

Flocks of starlings producing dazzling patterns across the sky are natural examples of active matter — groups of individual agents coming together to create collective dynamics. In a study featured on last week’s cover of the journal Science, a team of researchers including a UC Merced theoretical

Image

Researchers Forge a New Weapon to Fight Parasites and Other Infections

Breakthrough collaborative science by an interdisciplinary team of researchers brought together by computational biology Professor David Ardell promises a new approach for treating all types of infections. Infections have become more dangerous in recent years because bacteria and parasites rapidly

Image

Researchers Aim to Solve the Unsolvable to Predict the Unseeable

A pair of UC Merced researchers are combining computational chemistry and machine learning principles to solve what seems to be an intractable problem at the heart of quantum mechanics: predicting the movement of electrons, also known as electron dynamics. Over the next three years with a $1.2

Image

Star Student and NASA Standout Preparing for a Stellar Future

Like many young women, Calista Lum absorbed the message that she was not as capable as her male peers when it came to science, technology, engineering and math. Teachers in her Fairfield high school engineering classes often asked if male classmates had done her work for her. “I just assumed the

Image

Physicist Found His Path to the Future at UC Merced

When Denzal Martin started his undergraduate work at UC Merced, he wasn’t thinking about a career in physics, interning with NASA or attending graduate school. The Los Angeles native was studying computer science and engineering. One day, though, he decided to attend a materials science and