By 2050, the U.S. population is estimated to grow to 400 million, and the world population to 9.1 billion, requiring a 70 percent increase in global food production.
UC Merced is one of four campuses across the country uniting to meet that challenge by harnessing the power of innovation and technology to develop precision agriculture for a sustainable future.
Change is everywhere at UC Merced this year, from hiring a new chancellor to the completion of a major campus expansion. The Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI), an early hallmark of research excellence at UC Merced, is also making a change: After a 13-year tenure, Faculty Director Professor Roger Bales has stepped down and Professor Tom Harmon is taking the reins.
Since 2011, the Hellman Fellows Fund has provided close to 60 UC Merced assistant professors with much-needed research support in the form of seed funding. The prestigious Hellman Fellowship has launched countless careers at UC Merced and across the UC system.
Now, thanks to a generous new $3.5 million gift from the Hellman family, UC Merced will permanently establish the UC Merced Society of Hellman Fellows starting in 2021. The endowment allows the program to continue in perpetuity, while affording the campus more flexibility in funding early-career research.
Maybe now more than ever, scientists need to understand the immune system.
A new National Institutes of Health grant is funding a cross-disciplinary collaboration between bioengineering Professor Joel Spencer and immunology Professor Jennifer Manilay that will allow them to watch as immune-system cells develop in the bone marrow of a living mouse to gain insights into how they work.
Mechanical systems, such as car engines and manufacturing equipment, use petroleum-based lubricants and solvents that are considered hazardous. After use, those compounds mostly end up in the earth.
Environmentally friendly alternatives — room-temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) — that don’t need solvents and can perform better haven’t been widely used because of a lack of basic understanding about how they work.
Summertime means fun in the water, but as temperatures increase, algal blooms can grow in freshwater and marine ecosystems.
Some algae are natural and life-giving, while others are the result of life out of balance and can have harmful effects. Consisting of bacteria and tiny plankton, they arise quickly and alter the ecosystem by consuming available oxygen, killing fish.
Incoming first-year and transfer students will have a new resource for success and an introduction to research starting next summer, thanks to a four-year, $400,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The coronavirus pandemic has upended everything, including UC Merced’s classes and research. But materials science and engineering Professor Christopher Viney and recent graduate and independent study student Jasmine Nava are working on a microscopy project, even without access to their usual lab.
Many of the items people use in their everyday lives, from baby clothes and Halloween costumes to furniture, are doused with chemical flame retardants designed to make the items safer.
Theoretical physics Professor Ajay Gopinathan has been working over the past decade to model a submicroscopic mystery. Now, he and a team of colleagues have verified an important piece of the puzzle of how tiny, intrinsically twisted protein filaments responsible for repairing and growing cells know where to go to perform their function.
The work could someday enable scientists to control bacterial growth.
