Students who visit the UC Merced Students First Center (SFC) in the lobby of the Leo and Dottie Kolligian Library will see it’s different from other student services offices.

Graduate student Kaitlin Lubetkin and several sure-footed assistants spent much of the summer in Yosemite National Park.

They sleep in secret, fuzzy beds and have questionable dietary habits. They prefer to be active in the evenings and early mornings. They are easily startled and can, if the situation calls for it, do some damage with their legs.

They are not ninjas, nor are they the freshmen who live in the dorms.

They are the bunnies that live on the UC Merced campus.

UC Merced is one of only seven universities nationwide to receive a grant from the Council of Graduate Schools to develop new approaches for enhancing graduate student skills for assessing undergraduate learning, and to help prepare students for future careers as university faculty members.

In addition to being the only UC campus to receive a grant, UC Merced is among prestigious company.

MERCED, Calif. — The effort to create a natural reserve out of nearly 6,000 acres adjacent to UC Merced has been jump-started by the hiring of two people to share the management duties. 

More than two dozen UC Merced undergraduates spent the summer exploring a tiny but hot topic — materials 100,000 times slimmer than a human hair that are poised to revolutionize sensing, data collection and other technologies.

When UC Merced first announced it would be sending students to the national political conventions through The Washington Center program, senior Chelsea Coe never expected she'd be one of the lucky two.

Zhijiang "Justin" Ye wasn’t expecting to attend the newest campus in the UC system.

He just wanted to work with Professor Ashlie Martini.

When Ye, then a student at University of Minnesota, connected with Martini and asked to join her research group, he found out she wasn’t staying at Purdue University, where he planned to earn his doctoral degree.

Students transferring to the University of California, Merced, from California community colleges can apply for financial support thanks to a new endowed scholarship fund from The Bernard Osher Foundation.

The $500,000 gift to UC Merced provides scholarships ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 per student to five to 10 transfer students who show the greatest potential to fulfill their educational goals at UC Merced.

Chemistry Professor Jason Hein and his students make a lot of compounds in the lab.

They also make a lot of chemical waste.

But Hein found a way to clean up the waste and reuse it, saving money and helping the environment at the same time.