Dozens of innovative ideas were on display at UC Merced's Innovate to Grow event May 11. The biannual event provides an opportunity for engineering students to showcase their capstone projects, in which teams work with local businesses and other institutions for several months to solve problems or challenges.
The Circular Bioeconomy Innovation Collaborative (CBIO Collaborative) has been awarded $1 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation's (NSF) Regional Innovation Engines program for "Advancing Circular Bioeconomy Technologies in North San Joaquin Valley."
The CBIO Collaborative is among the more than 40 unique teams to receive one of the first NSF Engines Development Awards, which aim to help partners collaborate economic, societal and technological opportunities for their regions.
Teams of students from throughout California converged on UC Merced the weekend of April 21-23 to spend 48 hours tackling issues surrounding a precious resource: water.
Professor Roberto Andresen Eguiluz has received a CAREER award for his research into the underlying cause of arthritis.
He is the 33rd researcher from UC Merced to earn a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The new UC Merced Farms Food Future innovation initiative is investing in 10 graduate researchers to solve climate and community challenges. Their work is the start of a concerted focus in climate-smart agriculture for the campus.
One question students considering attending UC Merced might ask is, "What's there to do around there?"
The quick answer is - a lot. There are plenty of ways for students to spend their leisure time in the greater Merced area, for students of varying interests:
Are you an outdoors enthusiast? Do you enjoy nights out with crowds of friends? Are you a devoted video game player? Do you like the challenge of thrift shopping? Do you prefer to just chill out, perhaps with a book while water laps gently at the shore?
Sarif Morningstar wondered something: "What happens if I grow plants using fog?"
The UC Merced student's efforts to find an answer to that question led to a research project they got paid to conduct. That in turn led to an opportunity to study plant biology in the UC Davis Ph.D. program.
Like Morningstar, many undergraduate students at UC Merced can get paid to do research under the newly adopted Learning Aligned Employment Program (LAEP).
Roughly a third of all food worldwide goes to waste.
Outside of the obvious direct costs, that waste has numerous other repercussions: much of it goes to landfills, where it generates methane, a greenhouse gas. Resources such as water and seeds are squandered. And at the same time, one in four people are experiencing food insecurity.
"We're wasting all this food when folks are going hungry," said Erin Meyer, Sustainable Food Programs coordinator for UC Merced.
After weathering a pandemic shutdown and some fairly withering criticism, UC Merced's food service programs have emerged better than ever.
The shutdown that started in 2020 brought about abrupt changes to food service operations - prepackaged items were the order of the day to feed students, and for catering, there were no orders of the day.
Materials Science and Engineering Professor Beth Nowadnick has earned a National Science Foundation (NSF) award to study materials that may provide new ways to store or process information.
Nowadnick has been collaborating for the past two years with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) scientist Sinead Griffin on the project that led to the grant, which totals $379,374.
