Biological Sciences

Unraveling Cancer’s Neural Connections: NIH-Funded Study Investigates How Stem Cell Regulation Influences Tissue Renewal, Cancer Development

November 3, 2025

The same cellular renewal that keeps our bodies healthy might also fuel the growth of cancer. A UC Merced biologist has found that the brain could hold the key to stopping it. Professor Néstor Oviedo, a molecular and cell biologist and affiliate of the Health Sciences Research Institute,...

New Grant More than Doubles Campus Supercomputing Power

UC Merced is rapidly gaining a strong reputation for research and scientific computing across many disciplines and a major expansion of its computing infrastructure is about to cement the campus...

Some Immune Cells Appear to ‘Know’ the Coronavirus, Even Though They’ve Never Met

Having had the common cold appears to have programmed some people’s immune cells to recognize the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. That discovery — by an immunology team that includes...

‘From the Valley, For the Valley’: Local Students Start Training at UCSF to Become Physicians for the Region

The San Joaquin Valley has a shortage of doctors, but students such as Kyle Shen (’18) aim to change that by attending a tailored track at UCSF’s medical school specifically designed to...

$3.5 Million Hellman Endowment Expands Future of Research at UC Merced

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...

New Project Aims to Advance Understanding of Immune Cells as they Develop

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...

Study Reveals How Chemicals in Flame Retardants Interfere with Brain Development

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. But a ...

Grad Students, Alums Receive NSF Research Fellowships

Two UC Merced Ph.D. students, a recent undergraduate and an alumna have each been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP). The fellowship provides multiyear...

Researchers Forge a New Weapon to Fight Parasites and Other Infections

Breakthrough collaborative science by an interdisciplinary team of researchers brought together by computational biology Professor David Ardell promises a new approach for treating all types of...

Researchers Discover Mechanism Proteins Use To Find And Control Genes

Bioengineering Professor Victor Muñoz has answered a long-standing genetic mystery, and his research suggests that someday, bioengineers could devise ways to control gene activity — manually...