UC Merced will host Research Week April 13-17, celebrating innovative work across campus and encouraging engagement in research among students, faculty and staff.

The weeklong event allows the campus community to showcase research findings, participate in workshops, take tours and connect with fellow researchers.

UC Merced saw broad gains in the U.S. News and World Report 2026 Best Graduate Schools rankings with graduate programs rising in national standing, reflecting the campus’s growing academic and research profile.

On March 20, UC Merced's Center for Health Equity brought together researchers, regional health partners and community members to share findings from a study on how community health workers are transforming patient care across the San Joaquin Valley.

Professors Asmeret Asefaw Berhe and Ming-Hsuan Yang have been named 2025 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals.

They are among the nearly 500 scientists, engineers and innovators who have been recognized this year for their distinguished scientific and social achievements.

Although the oceans are the least explored places on the planet, even their depths are not untouched by humans.

Drawing on more than 2,300 seawater samples collected across the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans, researchers found that hundreds of synthetic chemicals — many of them rarely monitored and originating from everyday products — are now woven into the fabric of marine organic matter.

Ten UC Merced graduate researchers are gearing up to deliver the most intense three minutes of their academic careers.

Each spring, master’s and Ph.D. students across the campus’s three schools are invited to participate in Grad Slam — a fast‑paced competition that challenges scholars to distill their cutting‑edge research into a crisp, engaging presentation for a general audience.

Applications are open for the 2026 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Data Science Challenge, a two-week summer internship that gives students a firsthand look at national lab research through high‑impact, data‑driven problem solving.

High-risk conditions for fires are increasingly happening across countries at the same time, making wildfires even more challenging to tackle, new research reveals.

Scientists from UC Merced and the University of East Anglia found this synchronized extreme fire weather — characterized by exceptionally warm, dry and often windy conditions — has increased strongly worldwide since 1979, becoming more widespread throughout regions, not just in single locations.

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.