Professor Suzanne Sindi found her calling in seventh grade, while reading “Jurassic Park.”

“I liked the idea that math is a tool for understanding the whole world,” she said.

Retired astronaut and engineer Jose Hernandez and acclaimed author and organic farmer David Mas Masumoto will deliver keynote addresses at the University of California, Merced’s eighth commencement exercises May 18 and 19.

With more than 900 students eligible to graduate, this year marks the largest graduating class in UC Merced’s history.

As a result of such growth, the campus plans two school-based ceremonies to accommodate students and their families.

A collaboration between a dean and a professor and a grant from the National Science Foundation have made UC Merced part of a national nanotechnology-biology hub that will expand both knowledge and opportunities for students in Merced.

A couple years ago, Alejandra Vazquez signed up to be a community service officer on the UC Merced campus.

She thought she was just taking an interesting job, but for her and others, the experience has turned out to be so much more.

Community service officers, student employees with the Department of Public Safety, provide an invaluable service to the campus community, the police department and the Merced community.

The theory that temperature limits how far up in the mountains trees can grow looks like it’s true, but not in the way researchers had expected.

Working with Professor Lara Kueppers, UC Merced postdoctoral researcher Andrew Moyes’ examination of how warmer temperatures affect alpine-area trees has been published in the international journal Oecologia.

Graduate students Kristynn Sullivan and Chris Fradkin took distinctly different routes to UC Merced.

Researchers at the university in your backyard are delving into issues of great importance to the San Joaquin Valley, the state, the nation and the world.

You can learn more about their work at the eighth annual UC Merced Research Week, from March 4 through 8, on campus and in downtown Merced.

Research at UC Merced encompasses cancer; diabetes; climate change; water, soil and air quality; water availability; nanotechnology and robotics; history; mapping; archaeology; human genes; and much, much more.

Graduate student Sharon Patris likes spending time at a lake in the middle of the forest on an uninhabited island in the western Pacific.

The marine lake named Ongiem’l Tketau and informally known as Jellyfish Lake, is home to the golden jellyfish, a species Patris studies as part of her work with UC Merced School of Natural Sciences Professor Michael Dawson in Palau.

UC Merced School of Engineering Professor Elliott Campbell has co-authored a paper showing that mountaintop removal mining will dramatically accelerate the regional effects of global warming by turning natural carbon sinks into sources of carbon emissions, some within the next 15 years.

A UC Merced professor is one of five finalists in an international challenge that could win him a $50,000 research grant and free access to a record-setting, ocean-going robot.

Professor Michael Beman, with the School of Natural Sciences, entered the PacX Challenge, a competition designed to encourage scientists and students to make use of data gathered by autonomous wave glider that just completed a 9,000-nautical-mile journey across the Pacific Ocean.