Lorena Anderson

COSMOS Expands to UC Merced, Opening Doors for California’s Brightest Young Scientists

December 11, 2025

High school students will have a wider array of research opportunities through COSMOS starting next summer.

Starting next summer, UC Merced will join an elite group of University of California campuses hosting COSMOS — the California State Summer School for Math and Science — giving some of the state’s most talented high school students a new destination for exploring advanced STEM...

UC Merced MESA Lab Wins Big Ideas Contest

Now ubiquitous, machine learning has made its way into farming, thanks to an affordable, unmanned ground vehicle that recognizes and spatially maps agricultural pest infestations, treating them with...

Professor Sora Kim examines a fossilized shark's tooth.

One Key to Climate Change Could Be Stuck in a Shark’s Tooth

Most people wouldn’t think sharks can teach researchers about the planet’s distant past and its more immediate future. UC Merced paleoecologist Professor Sora Kim isn’t most...

Vicky Espinoza presents her story at a recent symposium.

Grad Student Represents Valley at Global Food Security Symposium

Graduate student Vicky Espinoza shared the plight of some San Joaquin Valley families with a wide audience this spring in her role as a Next Generation delegate to this year’s Chicago Council...

A picture of a soil chronosequence in Hawaii shows yellow sulfur-rich soil that has built up over millions of years.

UC Merced Researchers Help Uncover Soil Biodiversity

A rigorous, first-of-its-kind global study provides new insights into the natural history of soil biodiversity and shows that changes in soil pH during soil development is a major driver of most of...

PLOS One Talk and Panel at UC Merced to Address Open Access Publishing

Join Joerg Heber, editor-in-chief at the journal PLOS One for his talk, “Advancing Open Science at PLOS One” followed by a panel discussion in the Leo and Dottie Kolligian Library, Room...

A child is surrounded by air pollution from traffic.

Air Pollution Impacts Childhood Development, New Study Shows

Children who live near major roads are at higher risk for developmental delays because of traffic-related pollutants. That’s the major finding of a new study authored by UC Merced...

MSE Student Receives Prestigious Scholarship

Each year, only two ASM International/SAMPE scholarships are awarded to students throughout northern California. This year, UC Merced junior John Misiaszek is one of them. Misiaszek conducts...

Waterbirds take flight over a large wetland area along the Pacific Flyway.

Climate Change is Negatively Affecting Waterbirds in the American West

Climate change is having a profound effect on the millions of migrating birds that rely on annual stops along the Pacific Flyway as they head from Alaska to Patagonia each year. They are finding...

Two professors are researching how to predict those who is most likely to use firearms to commit suicide.

New Project Aims to Predict People Likely to use Firearms in Suicides

The majority of people who die by suicide do so with firearms, and there were more firearm suicides in America in 2017 than there were homicides committed by any method. Combined. Those shocking...