Faculty members at UC Merced are taking the lead on four Multicampus Research Program Initiatives (MRPI), working with colleagues around the University of California system to address challenges around labor and agriculture, active matter, Indigenous health and fusion energy.
“The MRPI program funds discoveries that are made possible only by the convergence of disciplines to improve the lives of Californians and draws world-class student, faculty and staff talent to our university and our state,” said UC Vice President of Research and Innovation Theresa Maldonado. “UC programs like this help keep California at the forefront of breakthrough research, technological innovation and equitable opportunities to thrive.”
Since 2009, the UC Office of the President has made 125 MRPI grants totaling $156.6 million and involving 739 UC faculty members.
This year, 14 grants total $15.5 million and will fuel research on the cutting edge of medicine, artificial intelligence, agriculture, climate justice and many other important challenges. These highly competitive grants attracted applications from 153 teams.
Active Matter
Scientists at UC Merced, UC Santa Barbara and UC San Diego will use MRPI funding to establish the UC Active Matter Hub.
Active matter refers to collections of particles or organisms that can convert energy into motion, like flocks of birds or colonies of bacteria, creating group behaviors through individual movement. The study of active matter lies at the intersection of physics and biology.
Led by Department of Physics professors Kevin Mitchell and Linda Hirst, the hub aims to seed global leadership in a field with the potential to reshape adaptive technologies and biomimetic microdevices.
The $300,000 grant will support Merced, Santa Barbara and San Diego research groups as they work to make the UC an international leader in active matter. The scientists will take active matter research in new directions as they form new collaborations and train graduate and undergraduate students in this emerging field.
Agricultural Technology
Professor Tom Harmon, director of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, will continue a previously awarded MRPI titled “Labor and Automation in California Agriculture: Equity, Productivity and Resilience.”
The $3.1 million grant continues to support researchers at Merced, Berkeley, Davis, Riverside and UC Agriculture & Natural Resources as they partner with farmers, workers and agriculturalists to create a new model for agricultural technology that is farmer- and worker-friendly, while enhancing productivity and environmental sustainability.
LACA features interwoven research thrusts that, though separate, require a transdisciplinary approach to be successful. The scientists are developing novel stationary and robotic ag tech systems, novel environmental sustainability tools that examine the future of farm work, barriers to adoption and California farm labor markets. They also are addressing key policy, social, legal and agroeconomic issues that LACA needs to consider while creating the model for ag tech and labor.
LACA will cross-train UC graduate students in the main research areas, motivate UC undergraduates to pursue ag tech-related careers and inspire California middle schoolers from under-resourced communities to better lives and careers as part of an equitable, productive and resilient California food system, Harmon wrote in his proposal.
Laser Fusion
Physics Professor David Strubbe also received an extension on his 2023 grant, which leverages partnerships with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and works with researchers at Berkely, Irvine, San Diego and Los Alamos National Laboratory to pursue laser fusion as a clean energy source.
The quest for laser fusion reached a critical milestone in 2021 when ignition was achieved at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. But to make further progress, it is imperative to better understand the first stage of such experiments, in which a solid at ordinary temperature and pressure absorbs laser light and transitions into plasma, reaching conditions similar to the center of the sun.
Newly developed materials, such as aerogel foams, hold the promise of even higher energy gains, but the ability to model these complex materials has only just begun.
With the $1.4 million grant, this project has been working to develop advanced multiscale simulation models to apply experimental platforms that can validate the simulations. The project also offers opportunities for Ph.D. students and postdocs to work with interdisciplinary faculty teams and national lab scientists as they learn advanced theoretical and experimental methods. The project has been making good progress and aims to achieve its basic objectives by the end of the grant period in 2025, Strubbe said.
Indigenous Health
Professor Anna Epperson was awarded $738,000 in 2023 to study social networks and health among Indigenous Californians, and her grant has been extended.
California is home to the largest population of Indigenous people in the U.S. Research shows that a network of people connected through interpersonal relations, such as family and friends, influences health behaviors and outcomes. Indigenous people have strong and interconnected social networks, which may play an even bigger role in health-related perceptions and behaviors. Indigenous populations experience long-standing health inequities and have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, with some of the highest rates of hospitalization and death. However, rates of COVID-19 vaccination (including boosters) are lower compared to other racial/ethnic groups.
Epperson and researchers from UC Santa Cruz and UC San Francisco plan to study social network information flows for COVID-19 vaccination and continue to contextualize Indigenous health decision-making within social networks more broadly.
In addition to the four projects led by UC Merced, other campus researchers will be part of many of the MRPI projects that focus on climate change, air pollution, agriculture, the humanities, chemistry and other important topics:
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Experts from UC’s five Agricultural Experiment Stations will convene to study barriers and opportunities for California farms to adopt practices and principles of agroecology. The team from Merced, Davis, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Riverside and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources aims to boost the agriculture industry’s climate resilience, biodiversity, equity and economic viability, working on challenges focused on decontaminating wastewater and climate proofing agriculture by redesigning dirt.
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Merced researchers will work with several other campuses on the California Organic, Agroecology and Regenerative Transitions Project, which aims to map and understand agroecological transitions; promote equity; and enhance UC undergraduate and graduate and extension education, as well as developing proposals for changes to UC and state policy.
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Researchers will join with colleagues at Berkeley, Davis, Riverside, Santa Barbara and San Diego to form the UC Climate Action Arts Network, which hopes to engage California’s public for change that keeps pace with climate actions and goals.
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UC Merced also join with Santa Cruz, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara to leverage California's linguistic diversity to improve large language models. The project builds on an existing network of researchers in California to develop an assessment of how linguistic and neurocognitive diversity can be incorporated into the design of LLMs for more equitable use.
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Scholars will collaborate with colleagues at Santa Cruz, Irvine, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles to examine routes of enslavement in the Americas, using the Intra-American Slave Trade Database, created by researchers at Santa Cruz. The database documents more than 27,000 trafficking voyages from one part of the Americas to another from 1550 to 1860. The project will expand the collaboration to a network of scholars across UC campuses to strengthen slavery studies at UC and increase the database’s coverage.
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UC Davis has invited researchers from Merced and Irvine to be part of a study on toxic air pollutants in California’s environmental justice communities. The project will use novel and less expensive methods of measuring toxic air pollution, partner with community groups and work with them on advocacy and policy analysis to improve air quality and health; train a new generation of interdisciplinary researchers able to help disadvantaged communities with their air quality problems; and support the work of three early-career underrepresented minority assistant professors.
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Berkeley, Merced, Davis and San Diego will address one of the most challenging, complex and controversial issues in the management of the California Bay-Delta: how to balance nationally significant agricultural and fisheries interests, statewide water supply reliability interests, federally and state-protected ecological interests, and local recreational, cultural-historical and subsistence interests in the management of salinity, an increasing challenge in the face of extended drought and a rising sea level.
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San Diego, Merced, Irvine, Davis and Los Angeles will continue a collaboration dubbed UC-Dust, to address future changes in California dust storms, which are associated with a multitude of negative human health, economic and environmental impacts.
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Scholars at Irvine, Merced, Berkeley and Riverside will work on strengthening policy and translational research to advance health equity in California.
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Berkeley is taking the lead on forming the California Interfacial Science Institute (CISI), along with Merced, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, San Diego and the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The goal is to coordinate and consolidate theoretical and experimental efforts across the UC to create a world-leading center that can lead to technological developments for addressing critical contemporary challenges.
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Along with scholars at all the other campuses, Merced researchers will focus on furthering humanities research into subjects such as the cultural impact of digital technologies; the origins and consequences of racism and racialization; the creative expression and agency of marginalized groups and the pluralism and global reach of literary and artistic traditions; the social components of climate change; the experiential and historical dimensions of mass migration; the future of the liberal arts; and humanities and work.
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Santa Barbara, Merced, Davis, Riverside and Santa Cruz are forming The Global Latinidades Project, to globalize Latinx studies for the next millennium. The goal is to recover and assess new and complex models of Latinx life, culture, history and politics — or Latinidades — that are synthesized in contact with peoples and contexts throughout the world, particularly Africa and the Mediterranean, Asia and Pacific Islands, subaltern Europe and neglected areas of the Americas.
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Researchers at Davis and Merced are forming the UC Coronavirus Assembly Research Consortium to perform fundamental studies and test therapies targeted at disrupting viral assembly.
