UC Merced Research

research of dna strands

As it is at all University of California campuses, research is the cornerstone of UC Merced. Innovative faculty members conduct interdisciplinary, groundbreaking research that will solve complex problems affecting the San Joaquin Valley, California and the world. Students — as early as their first years — have opportunities to work right alongside them, sometimes even publishing in journals and presenting at conferences.

Top Articles

Flames, the beach and the ocean are depicted in a scene from the January 2025 Palisades fire.

Researchers Look Ahead to Fire Season 2025

Pictures accompanying Professor John Abatzoglou's presentation on the 2025 fire season were blurry. That was intentional, he said, because so much about wildfire is unpredictable. "There's a lot that we know, and a lot we don't know," he said....
Read More
Depicted are two electric vehicle charging stations at UC Merced.

Researchers Make the Case for Charging Cars During the Day

Many people with electric vehicles drive them to work during the day and then charge them overnight after returning home. But a simple reversal of that schedule could make it cheaper and easier to charge your electric car. That was the conclusion...
Read More

 

Research isn’t limited to labs with beakers and microscopes, though there are plenty of those here.

The list of UC Merced’s research strengths is long and includes climate change and ecology; solar and renewable energy; water quality and resources; artificial intelligence; cognitive science; stem-cell, diabetes and cancer research; air quality; big-data analysis; computer science; mechanical, environmental and materials engineering; political science; and much, much more.

The campus also has interdisciplinary research institutes with which faculty members affiliate themselves to conduct even more in-depth investigations into a variety of scientific topics.

Recent Articles

Students Building Living Machines Out of Engineered Tissues

There are many labs at UC Merced where visitors can see students huddled over microscopes and petri dishes, using tweezers to extract and examine different items. But no one at UC Merced has ever seen the likes of what’s going on in Professor Kara...
Read More

Study: Early High-Altitude Settlers Were Hunter-Gatherers, Not Farmers

A new paper by UC Merced Professor Mark Aldenderfer begins to settle a longstanding debate over when people began permanently occupying higher elevations of the Tibetan Plateau, and shows communities did not have to be based around agriculture and...
Read More

Scientists Build Synthetic Cell-Sized Membranes Out of Paper

Scientists have been synthesizing lipid membranes from a variety of materials, making them as lifelike as possible to learn more about how cells work and how they can be manipulated. UC Merced Professor Anand Subramaniam and his students have come up...
Read More

Study: Warming Could Slow Upslope Migration of Trees

By Dan Krotz, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Scientists expect subalpine trees to advance upslope as global temperatures increase, following their climate up the mountains. But new research published Dec. 15 in the journal Global Change...
Read More

Robots and People Working Together to Save Water and Enhance Agriculture

A nearly $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is helping University of California researchers refine collaborative robotic technology that could change the way crops are maintained worldwide, saving millions of gallons of water...
Read More

Researchers Enlist Hospital in Fight Against Antibiotic Resistance

There are 1.7 million multidrug-resistant, hospital-acquired infections that extend hospital stays, increase medical expenses and decrease quality of life. The United States alone reports at least 120,000 deaths annually from resistant infections that...
Read More
  • 36 of 54