Professor YangQuan Chen has many reasons to be proud of his Mechatronics, Embedded Systems and Automation (MESA) Lab.

Besides being extremely popular — so popular the lab has to turn away applicants — the lab now has nine Federal Aviation Administration certificates to fly unmanned aerial vehicles around the Central Valley.

The UC Merced Alumni Association and Athletics and Recreation will host the inaugural UC Merced Journey 5K Fund Run on Sept. 5 to celebrate the campus’s 10th anniversary.

Current students, staff and faculty members, alumni and community members are invited to participate. All proceeds from the run will support student scholarships. The goal is to raise $2,500, which will be matched 3-to-1.

A new grant from the U.S. Department of Education will help the University of California, Merced, establish important support services for first-generation and low-income students who have yet to declare a major.

The grant, totaling $1.09 million over five years, will launch the Strengthening Talents and Exploring Pathways (STEP) program. STEP will be part of the Calvin E. Bright Success Center’s existing Fiat Lux program, which serves underrepresented students at UC Merced.

As a high school student in Merce

The University of California, Merced, has moved a step closer to realizing its plan to build a new center in downtown Merced that will provide space for administrators and collaborations with community partners

The Campus Advocacy, Resources and Education (CARE) Office has moved to a new location in the Leo and Dottie Kolligian Library, Room 107. Students and staff and faculty members are invited to an open house from 3 to 5 p.m. on July 10.

UC Merced researchers won four of only 11 seed grants given out by the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) for the year.

CITRIS received 24 highly competitive proposals from the four CITRIS campuses: UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Merced and UC Santa Cruz. The 11 proposals receive an average of $55,000 each for a total of $600,000 in interdisciplinary research funds. The winning proposals include work that will use data analytics to optimize health care, communications and agriculture applications.

Climate scientist Emmanuel Vincent noticed climate change discussions in Europe had become somewhat politically polarized before he left France a few years ago, and found the same situation on a larger scale when he came to America.

Working together to study friction on the atomic scale, researchers at UC Merced and the University of Pennsylvania have conducted the first atomic-scale experiments and simulations of friction at overlapping speeds.