UC Merced Chancellor Dorothy Leland welcomed downtown business owners and members of the Merced Main Street Association for coffee and a chat at the new Downtown Campus Center on Friday.
“We are committed to decreasing the distance between the campus on the lake and the downtown,” Leland told the group. “Thank you for welcoming us.”
Besides being a groundbreaking research powerhouse, the University of California is an economic engine for California and the nation, providing an educated workforce and generating new knowledge, technologies, jobs, startup companies and spinoff industries.
Many of the state’s leading industries grew from UC research, including biotechnology, computing, semiconductors, telecommunications and agriculture, and our work in nanotechnology, clean energy, neuroscience, genomics and medicine is helping drive the next wave of California’s economic growth.
Driving past Merced Falls on the way to Lake McClure doesn’t usually inspire thoughts of a bustling mini-metropolis with its own movie theater.
But a new exhibit opening at the Merced County Courthouse Museum highlights a slice of Merced County’s past as an industrial center and showcases a new collaboration between the museum and the UC Merced Library and a graduate student.
Management Professor Alexander Petersen said that without the roadmaps UC Merced offers for new faculty, he’d have been adrift on campus his first year.
“I tend to get lost easily when there is a deluge of new information, so the new faculty seminars appropriately spread out information across the entire year into more digestible pieces,” he said.
Orientation seminars, though, are just one of the resources available to untenured faculty members who are new to UC Merced.
An ongoing effort to collect, digitally preserve and share 100 years of historical records by the UC Cooperative Extension (UCCE) has earned the UC Merced Library a more than $300,000 grant.
With race, immigration, rising inequality, gender discrimination and collective mobilization grabbing current headlines, the work of the UC Merced sociology unit — always relevant locally — is gaining wider recognition across the country.
Outstanding contributions in service to professional organizations, academic institutions and the advancement of criminal justice have earned Graduate Dean Marjorie Zatz the Julius Debro Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division on People of Color and Crime.
She will be honored at a luncheon ceremony today in Philadelphia as part of the ASC’s annual conference, where she will also present a session for attendees from around the nation.
Professor Laura Giuliano isn’t the only female economics faculty member at UC Merced, but she is the only faculty member who worked in the Obama administration before joining the campus.
As a senior labor economist supporting the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, Giuliano and her colleagues played a big role in policy written during the last administration.
Topics ranging from ethnobotany, public health and feminism to agriculture, urban growth and social movements are among the highlights of the Mesoamerican Studies Center’s upcoming conference at UC Merced.
If you’ve ever wondered why people stand where they do on the political spectrum, science might have at least part of the answer: People can be biologically predisposed to certain feelings toward politics and society.
A new paper lead-authored by UC Merced graduate student Chelsea Coe indicates that physiological factors can predict how someone will react when presented with political scenarios — an idea that demonstrates an emerging area of study, the intersection of biology and politics.
