Kenneth Mashinchi

Alzheimer’s disease affects people all over the world and Kumaran Akilan’s family is no different.

As the first-year student from Cupertino waits to see if his grandfather’s mild cognitive impairment is indeed Alzheimer’s, Akilan has been busy deciphering a new way to diagnose the disease — with a smartphone.

With the help of a friend, Akilan recently developed a computer-vision algorithm that extracts the retinal vessel system and determines abnormalities that can help detect the presence of Alzheimer’s.

As the only institution in the country with all LEED certified buildings, being sustainable is ingrained in UC Merced’s DNA. Now, a new competition is challenging the university to strive for carbon neutrality through a UC system-based initiative.

During the month of April, all 10 UC campuses will go head-to-head in the Cool Campus Challenge, a contest to see which UC location can do the most to reduce its carbon footprint and spread the word about the importance of becoming carbon neutral.

Representatives from UC Merced have joined President Janet Napolitano’s newly formed Chicano/Latino Advisory Council for the University of California.

UC Merced welcomed Beth Mitchneck, vice provost for Faculty Success at University of Massachusetts, Lowell, as part of Chancellor’s Dialogue on Diversity and Interdisciplinarity series last week.

Mitchneck presented “Institutional Change for Equality: A Recipe for Change,” which provided a framework for institutional transformation to help universities become more gender equitable.

UC Merced honored nearly 200 employees for their loyalty to the university and higher education at the annual Celebrating Service breakfast earlier this week.

Those honored each received a crystal award with milestone markers for their service to UC Merced and lapel pins for their total service. A service milestone is reached every five years.

Division leaders for the employees shared a few words about the employees’ impact during their years of service.

With nearly a third of all food worldwide being wasted and millions of people going hungry every day, preventing food from going to waste is a crucial operation.

The Bobcat Eats Food Waste Awareness and Prevention Program may have a long name, but in a short amount of time it is playing a major role in curtailing food waste in Merced County by rescuing food that would otherwise go to waste.

New student orientation and learning assistance coordinator Dulcemaria Anaya and School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts graduate specialist Karla Seijas were recognized as 2019 Latina Women of the Year at a luncheon earlier this month. The Merced County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce hosted the event recognizing three women for their work in the community.

The explorer mentality, public health Professor Stephen Wooding said, is what sets the students of UC Merced apart from anywhere else. A willingness to try something new, to go somewhere they’d never thought possible, is a part of the Bobcat DNA.

For three students, the time they spent traveling up and down the Amazon River over winter break fully embodies this desire to explore.

You can smell them a mile away; there’s no mistaking the smell of cows and their methane emissions.

The odor, of course, comes from tons of methane-spewing manure. Thanks to a multimillion-dollar grant from the California Strategic Growth Council’s competitive Climate Change Research Program, Professor Gerardo Diaz and his interdisciplinary team of UC Merced faculty will look to subdue that stench while also caring for the planet.

UC Merced students got a crash course in how to lead the world in moving toward sustainability last week as part of the Student Leadership Institute for Climate Resilience (SLICR).

The three-day residential program introduced students to the campus’s carbon neutrality, sustainability, food action and environmental justice communities through activities and tours and discussed strategies about how the students can take actions to help the world achieve a regenerative economy — one that is maintainable and does not exploit workers.