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Three UC Merced professors have been named 2026 Hellman Fellows, representing the university’s School of Engineering, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, and School of Natural Sciences.
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The fellowships will advance innovative research across three fields, from heat-responsive materials and the disappearance of Indigenous and Chicana women and girls to the nutritional value of plants consumed by livestock and wildlife.
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The awards bring UC Merced’s total to 71 Hellman Fellows, supporting early-career faculty as they build research programs, train student researchers and develop solutions with potential benefits for the Central Valley and beyond.
Professors Francesco Danzi, Blythe George and Matthew Hutchinson have been named 2026 Hellman Fellows. Each faculty member represents one of UC Merced's three schools, and together their projects reflect the depth and breadth of innovative research taking place across the campus.
The Hellman Fellows Fund supports promising early-career faculty members across the University of California as they build their research agendas. This year's awards bring UC Merced's total number of Hellman Fellows to 71.
Danzi, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, studies how the internal architecture of materials can be designed to produce unconventional mechanical behavior.
Structures tend to lose stiffness when they heat up. Danzi's fellowship project, "Inverting Thermal Softening: Mechanics of Actively Stiffening Metamaterials," asks whether architected materials can be designed to do the opposite.
The project will investigate metamaterials built from reconfigurable structural units that transform in controlled ways as temperatures change. As the units shift, their internal components can come into contact and lock, turning heat-driven deformation into a source of added stiffness. Danzi and his team will combine analytical mechanics, computational modeling and experiments to establish predictive relationships between a material's architecture, its thermal activation, and its resulting mechanical behavior.
The goal is to pave the way for a new class of dynamically tunable materials whose mechanical properties are not fixed when they are made but can be programmed to change during operation. The fellowship will support experimental validation of the concept and give graduate and undergraduate researchers hands-on experience in modeling, fabrication and experimental mechanics.
"I am deeply honored to be named a Hellman Fellow," Danzi said. "This award gives my research group the opportunity to pursue a high-risk idea that challenges a basic expectation in structural mechanics: that structures tend to become softer when subjected to thermal loading. The fellowship will allow us to move this concept from theory to experimental validation and establish the foundation for a broader research program in dynamically reconfigurable materials. I am also especially grateful for the opportunity this award provides to support and train students through hands-on research."
George, a professor in the Department of History and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, investigates why some women and girls seem to vanish from public attention just when they need help most. Her fellowship project, "The Visible-to-Invisible Pipeline: A Continuum of Disappearance in California's Central Valley," focuses on Indigenous and Chicana women and girls along the stretch of Highway 99 and Interstate 5 from Sacramento to Bakersfield.
Disappearance, George argues, is rarely a single, sudden event. More often, it is the endpoint of a long process. The same women who are closely watched by police, courts and other systems of control cant become nearly invisible to those systems when they go missing or are harmed. Her project aims to show how surveillance, criminalization and social marginalization combine over time to put certain women at greater risk.
With her fellowship, George will, for the first time, bring together data from her earlier tribal and statewide research on missing and murdered Indigenous people, or MMIP. She will use it to map patterns specific to the Central Valley, a region previous statewide studies did not examine on its own. The funding will also support a graduate student researcher, who will receive hands-on training in qualitative analysis and data management.
"I'm honored and grateful to receive a Hellman Fellowship," George said. "This support will help me study how Indigenous and Chicana women and girls can be highly visible to systems of surveillance and control, yet become difficult for those same systems to see when they need care or protection. I'm especially excited to bring the Central Valley into focus "
Hutchinson, a professor of life and environmental sciences, studies how livestock and wildlife choose what to eat from the often-diverse vegetation of California’s rangelands, and how those choices relate to a plant’s nutritional value.
His lab documents both sides of that equation. DNA sequencing of dung reveals which plants a cow or an elk has eaten, and lab tests measure how digestible those plants are. But turning digestibility into the energy an animal absorbs requires one more number: the total energy stored in the plant’s tissue.
Hutchinson’s fellowship project, “Expanding Agricultural Innovation at UC Merced: Completing the Livestock and Wildlife Nutrition Laboratory,” supplies that missing piece. The award will fund a bomb calorimeter, a device that combusts a plant sample in a controlled setting to measure how much energy it contains. With the calorimeter in place, Hutchinson said, his lab will have the rare capacity to identify what an animal ate and measure that food’s nutritional value. Fellowship funds will also send Hutchinson and three of his graduate students to Washington State University for training on the instrument.
The lab’s fieldwork already spans the state, from cattle on the Merced Vernal Pools and Grasslands Reserve to mule deer in the Los Banos and Yolo Bypass wildlife areas and the federally endangered Peninsular bighorn sheep in the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains.
“Since arriving at UC Merced, I have been aware of the way that the Hellman Fellows Fund supports exciting research and researchers across the UC system,” Hutchinson said. “I am humbled to be among this year’s awardees. Support from the Hellman Fellows Fund is enabling new capabilities to be added to our animal nutrition research on campus, which would otherwise be impossible.
“The equipment we are purchasing will generate crucial data on plant energy content that will enhance the accuracy and applied value of our research. As the lab continues to build, I expect our analytical capabilities to serve agricultural and ecological research at UC Merced as well as the Central Valley’s ranching communities and wildlife managers.”
About the Hellman Fellows Fund
The Hellman Fellows Fund was created in 1995 through an endowed gift to the University of California from Chris and Warren Hellman and their family. It supports early-career faculty members who show the capacity for great distinction in their fields. Awards range from $10,000 to $50,000, depending on project needs.
Since 2011, the fund has helped rising UC Merced faculty advance their work. In 2021, a generous gift from the Hellman family permanently established the UC Merced Society of Hellman Fellows.
