Patty Guerra

UC Merced police officers Enrique Rodriguez and Brian Carbaugh were on routine patrol July 26. Carbaugh had recently joined the department and was undergoing field training with Rodriguez.

At 6:22 p.m., they were dispatched to the Joseph Edward Gallo Recreation Center on campus for a medical aid call. A gentleman who had been involved in a pickup basketball game had collapsed.

"The report was that someone was having a heart attack," said Chief Chou Her. "When they arrived, people were performing CPR and attaching the automatic external defibrillator."

Nearly 65 percent of UC Merced's undergraduate students are the first in their families to go to college. Being a college student of any kind can be a thrilling, confusing, challenging, exciting, overwhelming experience, sometimes all at once. When you're the first in your family to go to college, there can be an added degree of uncertainty, as well.

In advance of First-Generation Student Week activities, the UC Merced newsroom asked some first-generation alumni and current students to share some advice for those following in their trailblazing footsteps.

Writing is still the most important, and most-used, form of communication in the world.

"Writing is crucial in that it's both a product and a process. It's in the fabric of what we do," said Paul Gibbons, teaching professor of writing studies at UC Merced. "Writing is a way of doing things in the world, of asking for things. It's still a major coin of the realm."

The new feature film "A Million Miles Away" is a universally relatable story of resilience and achievement, depicting Jose Hernández's journey from working the fields of the San Joaquin Valley to fulfilling his life-long dream of being a NASA astronaut.

But it's also a story with a very personal tie to UC Merced. Hernández, who went on to head an aerospace company and operate a vineyard, is a graduate of the University of California system and serves on the UC Board of Regents, and his son Antonio is a student at UC Merced.

UC Merced researchers will tackle climate changes in multiple ways through more than $4 million in grants recently awarded from within the university.

The Office of Research and Economic Development (ORED) issued nine awards totaling $4,096,197 for proposals that range from studying methane gas emissions to making electronic vehicles more accessible to people.

Three UC Merced researchers have recently received the prestigious Hellman Fellowship.

Computer science and engineering Professor Shijia Pan, economics Professor Briana Ballis and life and environmental sciences Professor Xuan Zhang have all been named Hellman Fellows.

Dozens of UC Merced students took their oaths as members of the College Corps recently. The program, which provides stipends to students in exchange for working with community partners, is in its second year.

The second cohort of UC Merced's College Corps was sworn in Sunday, Aug. 28.

It's more than just a way to help these students pay for college, explained Assistant Vice Chancellor for Student Engagement Brian O'Bruba, who administered the oath. It's an opportunity to develop a service mindset that will last a lifetime.

UC Merced public health Professor Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young has been awarded an R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The $3 million grant will fund Young's ambitious, five-year research project to understand how immigration policy influences health care access and the well-being of Latinos in rural California and Arizona counties, including Merced, Tulare, Imperial, Monterey and Napa.

UC Merced Computer Science and Engineering Professor Xiaoyi Lu is leading a collaboration that secured a $4.35 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) to improve federated machine learning systems.

UC Merced Computer Science and Engineering Professor Xiaoyi Lu is leading a collaboration that earned a $4.35 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) to improve machine learning systems.

Lu is partnering with the University of Iowa and Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago to improve the understanding of scalable, federated, privacy-preserving machine learning. The project was among five aimed at distributed resilient systems in science awarded a total of $40 million in funding from the DOE.