In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted many facets of life, including health care, schools and the work environment.

A new study by UC Merced researchers shows evidence that the pandemic also fueled an elevated number of wildfires in the United States that year.

How?

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.

UC Merced’s School of Engineering and its programs continue to be recognized by U.S. News & World Report as demonstrated in the release today of its 2025 Best Graduate Schools rankings.

The R1 school advanced three spots in the latest Best Overall Engineering Schools rankings, inching closer to the nation’s top 100.

“We will continue to strive for even greater heights and to make impactful contributions to the field,” School of Engineering Dean Rakesh Goel said.

Electrical engineering and computer science Professor Pengfei Su has received a CAREER award for his research on cross-layer performance tuning to enhance deep learning model efficiency.

He is the 41st researcher from UC Merced to earn a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

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 reached by a team of UC Merced researchers, who recently published a paper in the Electricity Journal on "Aligning Electric Vehicle Charging with the Sun: An Opportunity for Daytime Charging?"

The first solar-over-canal project in California, which started with research at UC Merced, has begun producing electricity. Plans are now in the works to expand the technology to other areas.

A groundbreaking initiative led by faculty from seven top research universities aims to accelerate the deployment of solar arrays over California's extensive canal network.

A multimillion-dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health will fund research at UC Merced that could help cancer patients and others live longer, healthier lives.

The $3.5 million, five-year grant will fund bioengineering Professor Joel Spencer's lab, which is investigating the thymus, a key organ in the human immune system.

Annaliza Perez Torres has already accomplished plenty.

A 2019 graduate of UC Merced, Perez was named the School of Engineering's Outstanding Student in Materials Science and Engineering and earned Research Excellence recognition from the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Center.

Now Perez, an engineer with Lockheed Martin, has received a Rising Technical Contributor Award from the Society of Women Engineers.

UC Merced researchers are taking part in a comprehensive, multi-agency effort aimed at efficiently measuring and mitigating methane emissions.

IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory are leading the effort, which earned a $20 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy in December.

Distinguished Professor Emeritus Roland Winston, a pioneer in solar energy, engineering and physics, died Feb. 8 at the age of 88 at his home in Merced.

A founding faculty member in the schools of Natural Sciences and Engineering at UC Merced, Winston also founded and directed the intercampus collaborative Advanced Solar Technologies Institute, known as UC Solar.

His research and teaching focused on concentrating solar energy systems. Winston published hundreds of articles in scientific journals, co-wrote several books and held more than 50 patents.