Each year, the Office of Research and Economic Development sponsors Research Week. Researchers from all corners of campus are encouraged to display their work and show visitors the important work they do.

Research Week always features student research-poster competitions, and, for the past couple of years, the 90-Second Video Challenge. A winner is chosen from each school in the poster competitions, and the campus community chooses the video winner, voting online after reviewing the submissions.

Those who win receive cash prizes. Congratulations to this year’s winners!

For the past two semesters, Introduction to Earth Systems Science — a large lecture and lab course at UC Merced — has been morphing into a hybrid of live lab and online “lecture.”

The link between UC Merced and downtown Merced will grow stronger this spring with the opening of a new business incubator.

Members of the campus and community are invited to learn more about UC Merced research — including work on sustainability, psychology and antibiotic resistance — during the university’s eighth annual Research Week, presented by the Office of Research and Economic Development.

Armando Quintero has been chosen as the new executive director of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI) at the University of California, Merced.

Several UC Merced faculty members will play important roles in a new UC systemwide effort to study the ecological effects of climate change across varied ecosystems.

In the fall semester, UC Merced Senior Lecturer Virginia Adán-Lifante offered extra credit to students who volunteered to translate a portion of the Valley Crisis Center website into Spanish.

First hosted at UC Merced in 2011, the CITRIS Mobile App Challenge is a semester-long competition that blends education, prototyping skills and teamwork to empower students to develop apps for societal benefit.

The challenge is expanding this year to include teams at UC Davis and UC Berkeley.

Winning teams at each school receive up to $1,000 and several have developed their apps further by raising additional funding, creating research initiatives, entering incubators or starting companies.

Even when we don’t notice it, service is a huge part of everyday life, from the people who make our morning cups of coffee to the doctors who save our lives, said Professor Paul Maglio, the founding director of UC Merced’s new California Center for Service Science.