Faculty

Professor and Environmental Champion Bales Retires, But Research and Advocacy Continue

November 10, 2025

Professors Roger Bales and Martha Conklin arrived in Merced in 2003, the first non-administrative faculty members at UC Merced. They came with a vision: to create a research university that would serve California’s future. Now, after more than 22 years of building institutions, mentoring...

Researcher Develops New Cloud Security Method for Mobile Users

A UC Merced researcher has come up with a new, super-efficient encryption system for smart phones that lets users secure data being sent to and retrieved from the cloud. Encrypting data on your phone...

Mapping Genomes of Pine Bacteria Yields Unexpected Results

UC Merced Professor Carolin Frank is helping figure out how a certain bacteria helps promote healthy tree growth by studying the bacteria’s genome sequence. In the new paper, published in the open-...

Campus Celebrates UC Natural Reserve System on Protected Lands

Research, teaching and public outreach were all on display today at UC Merced’s celebration of the University of California Natural Reserve System’s 50th anniversary. The inaugural celebration of the...

Study: Real-World Negotiators Bargain More Fairly

Experienced policymakers are more likely to make fair offers in bargaining than the average person, and less likely to accept low offers — even if it means both sides get nothing. Such were the...

Floodplain Management Can Increase Groundwater Supply

California’s groundwater is being rapidly depleted because cities and farms extract more than is replenished naturally, compacting local aquifers and decreasing supply in some places in the Central ...

Sociologist Earns Fulbright Scholar Award to Study in Honduras

Paul Almeida, a sociology professor at the University of California, Merced, has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant to study non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and their role in community well...

Professor to Serve with New Water Policy Center

UC Merced Professor Joshua Viers has been named a member of the new Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) Water Policy Center, established to help meet the state's urgent need for timely...

New Magnetic Resonance Lab Opens on Campus

Looking at molecules just got easier for UC Merced researchers, now that Professor Erik Menke, Professor Jason Hein and other colleagues have opened a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) lab. “It’s a...

Academic Trailblazers to Address UC Merced’s 10th Graduating Class

The University of California, Merced, has spent the past decade blazing a trail as the nation’s first research university of the 21st century, and its students are no different. In May, the campus’s...