Engineering

Rising Simultaneous Fire Weather Threatens International Firefighting Efforts

February 18, 2026

Depicted is a scene of burned-out trees and ash in the wake of the Caldor Fire.

High-risk conditions for fires are increasingly happening across countries at the same time, making wildfires even more challenging to tackle, new research reveals. Scientists from UC Merced and the University of East Anglia found this synchronized extreme fire weather — characterized by...

Wildfire Increasing in the West Because of Climate Change, Research Shows

The number, size and duration of large mountain forest fires in the Western United States has increased dramatically in the past 40 years, according to research from UC Merced Professor LeRoy...

Campus Getting Greener with New Research Growing Spaces

Everyone knows UC Merced is growing, but pretty soon, the campus will be growing lots of plant specimens for research, too. The School of Natural Sciences is buying a pair of greenhouses that will be...

New Supercomputing Cluster to Expand Campus Capabilities

A proposal to conduct high-performance computing across science and engineering disciplines has won UC Merced and Professor Christine Isborn a research computing cluster that will be used for a...

Innovate to Grow is Fertile Ground for University and Community Entrepreneurs

As a senior engineering student, Michael Urner selected a capstone project he related to. Little did he know that his 2013 Innovation and Design Clinic (IDC) project would lead him to start his own...

UC Merced Receives $5 Million for Interdisciplinary Research Center

Researchers at the University of California, Merced, won a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study how biological matter like proteins or cells come together to perform...

Internship Program Enhances Students’ Academic Experiences

Last fall, the Division of Student Affairs and the Office of Undergraduate Education launched an internship program with the goal of providing undergraduate students an opportunity to build...

UC Merced Becomes Drone Use Policy Hub

The drone research lab at the University of California, Merced, has catapulted the campus to the leading edge of the unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) field, and now the campus has been chosen as the...

Wells Fargo Gift Increases Focus on Critical Regional Projects

An increased gift from longtime campus partner Wells Fargo is allowing more engineering students at the University of California, Merced, to focus on solutions to problems related to water, energy...

NASA, UC Merced Successfully Test Miniature Methane Sensor

Researchers from the UC Merced Mechatronics, Embedded Systems and Automation (MESA) Lab and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) recently tested JPL miniature methane gas sensor similar to one...