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.

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When David Mendoza-Cózatl, a 2006 Pew Latin American fellow in the biomedical sciences, got an email soliciting applications for the Pew Innovation Fund, he sprang into action.

The Biology Integration Institute (BII): The Institute for Symbiotic Interactions, Training and Education in the Face of a Changing Climate, or INSITE, stands out because it is supported by $12.5 million from the National Science Foundation, one of the largest NSF grants UC Merced has ever received.

A new two-year project at UC Merced aims to bring academic and non-academic researchers together to recast the role of the humanities in public policy and, ultimately, improve the lives of San Joaquin Valley residents.

The collaborative project, entitled “Building Research Partnerships in the San Joaquin Valley: Community Engaged Research and Graduate Mentorship in the Interdisciplinary Humanities,” involves scholars and community organizations.

Since his undergraduate days in Environmental Studies at Humboldt State University, Ivan Soto has aspired to produce research with a positive impact on the public — not just to benefit the academic community.

It has been two years since UC Merced received the $280,000 Henry Luce Foundation grant, but its community engaged research endeavors are far from over.

This fall, UC Merced Interdisciplinary Humanities graduate students and faculty will have the benefit of two additional years of funding to find new opportunities to grow intersections of humanities research and community engagement in Merced.

Humanities education has been under fire on college campuses over the past decade.

“There’s a lot of concern nationally about graduate education in the humanities. We’re producing plenty of Ph.D.s but are there enough jobs for them upon graduation?” said anthropology and heritage studies Professor Robin DeLugan, who leads UC Merced’s Research Center for Community Engaged Scholarship (ReCCES).

“How do we make a humanities career more feasible?”

Physiology Professor Rudy M. Ortiz has been named this year's winner of the A. Clifford Barger Underrepresented Minority Mentorship Award by the American Physiological Society.

The UC Merced professor was recognized for his leadership, guidance and mentorship of underrepresented minority and diverse groups of students in the physiological sciences.

Research on cell development has led not only to a more efficient way to map proteins in living cells but also tapped into the research capabilities of UC Merced undergraduate students and brought about a new learning opportunity that could shape their futures.

Researchers know a protein’s function is intimately tied to its location in a cell. By mapping its location, they can better understand how its function — and the cell’s biology — changes over time.

Researchers at UC Merced used fruit flies to uncover a cellular process common to many organisms that could dramatically impact the understanding of cancer and aging.