UC Merced biology Professor Rudy Ortiz is furthering his innovative research into diabetes with support from a major pharmaceutical company.

Professor Fabian Filipp is trying to put up roadblocks. But instead of stopping cars, he's trying to keep cancers from growing.

Filipp, a systems biology professor who started at UC Merced this fall, studies the metabolic cycle of melanoma, which is the leading cause of death from skin cancers.

Professor Mónica Medina started out as the only marine biologist in a National Science Foundation workshop last year, but she ended up with a group of new partners and an opinion piece in the prestigious journal Science that’s being released today.

Staph, e-coli, meningitis, MRSA and botulism are just a few of the thousands of bacterial infections that plague people all over the world.

For example, almost 23,300 people in the United States were sickened by food-borne bacterial illnesses in 2008, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Catalina Hernandez, UC Merced's first Human Rights Center fellow, is spending this summer exploring how women decide to seek help from a midwife for childbirth instead of an obstetrician.

Six students, all with ties to the San Joaquin Valley, have been admitted to the UC Merced San Joaquin Valley Program in Medical Education (PRIME). The students have begun their first year of medical school with a two-day orientation at UC Merced and the UCSF Fresno Center for Medical Education and Research.

The second UC Merced San Joaquin Valley-PRIME cohort includes:

Professor Fred Wolf's research brings new meaning to the term barfly.

Researchers at the University of California, Merced, have discovered a new way in which bone health impacts a person's immune system.

The discovery could impact how scientists try to combat bone-related disease, as drugs to improve bone quality could weaken a person's immune system.

"The bone does have an influence on the basic biology of blood development," immunology Professor Jennifer Manilay said. "This interdisciplinary research shows the need to look at the whole organ."

Researchers with the University of California, San Francisco, and UC Merced will examine the effectiveness of state and local antismoking programs across the United States in an effort to make sure health authorities are able to use their increasingly limited resources to support and defend the most effective approaches.