Lorena Anderson

From Soil to Climate Solutions: Berhe Leads Sierra Nevada Research Institute into its Next Chapter

September 11, 2025

When Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe arrived at UC Merced in 2009, she and her husband, Professor Teamrat Ghezzehei, were leaving major research institutions to join a brand-new campus in California’s Central Valley. It was a leap of faith — one made easier by the Sierra Nevada Research...

UC Merced Researcher, Graduate Student, Contribute to Inventory of All Marine Life

Counting the number of species that live in the Earth’s oceans sounds as impossible as counting the grains of sand on a beach. But a global collaboration involving a UC Merced researcher and a...

Graduate Student Uses Llamas to Continue Research in Yosemite

Graduate student Kaitlin Lubetkin and several sure-footed assistants spent much of the summer in Yosemite National Park. Her frequent hiking companions were Toronado and Bravo — llamas who shouldered...

Campus Bunnies Still at Home Here

They sleep in secret, fuzzy beds and have questionable dietary habits. They prefer to be active in the evenings and early mornings. They are easily startled and can, if the situation calls for it, do...

New Grant to Help Prepare Grad Students for Faculty Careers

UC Merced is one of only seven universities nationwide to receive a grant from the Council of Graduate Schools to develop new approaches for enhancing graduate student skills for assessing...

Inaugural Managers to Lead New Vernal Pool Reserve

MERCED, Calif. — The effort to create a natural reserve out of nearly 6,000 acres adjacent to UC Merced has been jump-started by the hiring of two people to share the management duties. Sierra...

Graduate Student Finds Unexpected Home in Merced

Zhijiang “Justin” Ye wasn’t expecting to attend the newest campus in the UC system. He just wanted to work with Professor Ashlie Martini. When Ye, then a student at University of Minnesota, connected...

California is Home to Extreme Weather, Too

MERCED, Calif. — California isn’t going to face a superstorm like Hurricane Sandy because the Pacific Ocean is too cold to feed that kind of weather system. But that doesn’t mean California won’t see...

Chemistry Professor Making the Most of his Waste

Chemistry Professor Jason Hein and his students make a lot of compounds in the lab. They also make a lot of chemical waste. But Hein found a way to clean up the waste and reuse it, saving money and...

Professor: In Politics, It’s Not Just What You Say, It’s How You Say It

In an election year, as people are being machine-gunned with millions of dollars’ worth of political messages from all sorts of sources, it might be re-assuring (or distressing) to discover that even...