UC Merced Research

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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.
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....
Depicted are two electric vehicle charging stations at UC Merced.
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...

 

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

Researchers at the University of California, Merced, won a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study how biological matter like proteins or cells come together to perform specific tasks, effectively behaving as machines. The...
A single mother in Guatemala works at a factory owned by a U.S. company, but doesn’t make enough money to support her family. She immigrates to the U.S. and finds a low-paying job with no benefits and no unemployment insurance, and when she gets...
Professor Michael Beman, with the School of Natural Sciences, became the 13th faculty member to win a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award since the campus opened. The grant provides nearly $700,000 over the...
Cloth remains found in the Samdzong tomb complex in Nepal by UC Merced Professor Mark Aldenderfer suggest the village might have been part of the long-distance trade network of the Silk Road. Textile and dye analyses of the cloth — the results of...
Home-based interventions that teach parents to engage children in playful interactive learning activities can close the cognitive development gap between disadvantaged children and higher-resource peers, according to a new study led by UC Merced...
If you want to understand how plant populations will respond as the climate changes, just examine the plants in different locations. That’s one of the conclusions drawn by UC Merced School of Natural Sciences Professor Jason Sexton in a new paper...
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