Biophysical chemistry Professor Shahar Sukenik and the graduate students in his lab are trying to make sense out of what might seem to some to be chaos. They aim to better understand how a series of floppy, malleable proteins function — or malfunction — inside cells.
The work has earned Sukenik a $1.86 million, five-year Outstanding Investigator award from the National Institutes for Health (NIH).
A new coalition of universities and community partners across the state — including UC Merced —aims to address the COVID-19 pandemic in communities that are disproportionally affected.
Students and faculty worked with a record number of schoolchildren from Merced, the Bay Area and southern California all the way to Washington, D.C., enriching their learning and increasing their interest in science, technology, engineering and math.
Since 2007, UC Merced researchers have been extremely productive in the Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory (CZO), delving into investigations of hydrology, climate change, geology, biology and more.
But the National Science Foundation, which funded the CZOs, is decommissioning the sites and has reconfigured the program around themed research clusters in a new program called the Critical Zone Collaborative Network (CZCN).
Bird species usually are counted twice a year by wildlife surveyors: once during the breeding season and again during the Christmas Bird Count .
New technology, however, is increasing the accuracy of bird population studies. A team of UC Merced researchers is developing a model to recognize bird calls.
The technology world is punctuated by startups, and UC Merced is “starting up” its own program to invigorate computer science education in the San Joaquin Valley.
The National Science Foundation awarded a $300,000, two-year grant to support START UP SJV, which stands for “STEM Teachers Alliance for Regional Tech thinking through Underrepresented Professional development in the San Joaquin Valley.”
Researchers at the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the Banatao Institute at the University of California have launched a new public-private pilot initiative to bring telehealth services to underserved rural residents in Merced County.
Everyone will have opportunities to learn about collaborative research at the intersections of COVID-19 and topics related to the environment, health and equity through a series of online conference sessions this fall.
The world is a complex place, and humanity faces major challenges. Climate change mitigation might be the most difficult, in large part because of the interdependency of living things and their ecosystems.
How do people transform economic systems so they are also sustainable for people and the planet?
“If we don’t consider how everything connects from a systems perspective, we’re not going to solve grand challenges such as climate change,” Professor Tracey Osborne said. “Not even close.”
As scientists build smaller and smaller machines, they need to understand the invisible forces that make those machines work.
Thanks to research and the initiative of then-UC Merced graduate student Jake Pate, some of those forces can now be measured and manipulated.
