Students

UC Merced has once again been recognized as a national leader in community-engaged scholarship. The 2026 Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement affirms the university’s deep and expanding commitment to serving the public.

UC Merced women's soccer star Trinidad Quiroz has signed with Necaxa Femenil of Liga BBVA MX Femenil. Quiroz is the first Bobcat to sign a contract with the highest level of women's football in Mexico.

The forward from San Jose, Calif., is a two-time NAIA All-American and she earned All-CCAA First Team honors this past fall following the Bobcats first season in NCAA Division II.

Kevin Arrieta got into robotics to avoid getting into trouble.

Arrieta said he joined the robotics club at Dominguez High School in Compton high school after Gloria Esiobu, the teacher who ran it, gave him an ultimatum.

"I had gotten in with the wrong crowd," he said. "I had a physics teacher who told me, 'Join my robotics club or I'm calling your mom.'"

In the club, Arrieta found he loved working with sensors and doing programming, and he was good at it.

"You have an engineering mind and you don't even know it," his teacher said.

Hundreds of UC Merced students will be celebrated this weekend at the university’s fall commencement ceremonies in downtown Merced. Nearly 400 undergraduate students and 40 Graduate Division students are set to cross the stage in the Art Kamangar Center at the Merced Theatre during three ceremonies.

More than a dozen undergraduate students in UC Merced’s Sociology Club were immersed in the discipline’s breadth of research and professional possibilities during the California Sociological Association’s annual conference.

When UC Merced launches Give to UC Merced 2025 on Dec. 2, it won’t just be about one day of giving; the month-long campaign will be about hope, opportunity and community impact.

For the 12th year, the campus joins the global Giving Tuesday movement, inviting donors to power change through the university’s UC Merced Fund. Contributions to Give to UC Merced will support the campus’s greatest needs, ensuring UC Merced has the flexibility to fund emerging opportunities, expand programs and student support initiatives, and assist promising scholars with direct financial assistance.

Professors Roger Bales and Martha Conklin arrived in Merced in 2003, the first non-administrative faculty members at UC Merced. They came with a vision: to create a research university that would serve California’s future.

Now, after more than 22 years of building institutions, mentoring and pioneering environmental research, Bales has retired from UC Merced.

Chemistry Professor Henrik Larsson has received a prestigious Early Career Award from the U.S. Department of Energy, becoming the first faculty member from UC Merced’s School of Natural Sciences to earn the honor.

More than six in 10 UC Merced undergraduates are the first in their families to attend a university. The national average for four-year universities is about two in 10.

Opening doors to opportunity for first-generation students is infused into UC Merced’s DNA. Young people who had little to no information at home on how to be a young scholar find solid support, a welcoming campus and kindred spirits.

A team of scientists led by UC Merced is embarking on a project to understand how the twisted shapes of specific molecules can influence the spin of electrons — a phenomenon that could revolutionize solar energy, electronics and quantum computing.

The research, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program, focuses on a mysterious effect known as chirality-induced spin selectivity, or CISS.