Faculty

Postdoc Leads Study to Turn Cotton Waste into Climate-Smart Compost

November 12, 2025

three stages of cotton textile composting

UC Merced researchers are collaborating on a two-year research project to develop effective composting methods for cotton textiles. The project explores manufacturing cotton waste scraps from clothing into compost to demonstrate efficient composting with the right recipe, and the compost’s...

Engineered Protein Assemblies that Respond to Cues Open Path for Smart, Protein-Based Medicines

Proteins are miniscule machines inside the body, about 10,000 times smaller than the thickness of human hair. They control all the processes of life — like how cells communicate to each other,...

Rufus the Bobcat and the UC Merced campus community rung in the holiday season at the Beginnings lighting and food drive last week.

UC Merced Rings in Holiday Season with Beginnings Lighting, Food Drive

UC Merced’s iconic Beginnings sculpture represents arms reaching out to embrace students as they embark on a higher education journey filled with wonder, excitement and joy. Those same...

Zatz Named American Society of Criminology Fellow

The American Society of Criminology (ASC) has elected Vice Provost and Graduate Dean and sociology Professor Marjorie Zatz as an ASC Fellow — the society’s highest honor — in...

Researchers Aim to Solve the Unsolvable to Predict the Unseeable

A pair of UC Merced researchers are combining computational chemistry and machine learning principles to solve what seems to be an intractable problem at the heart of quantum mechanics: predicting...

Materials Science Researcher Honored with CAREER Award

Professor Yue ‘Jessica’ Wang, with the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation CAREER award, the 25th...

Tenure-Track Faculty Merit Reviews Go Paperless Thanks to New System

A new electronic workflow system for tenure-track faculty merit reviews is modernizing and eventually replacing a tedious, time-consuming and paper-heavy process at UC Merced. After a two-year...

Star Student and NASA Standout Preparing for a Stellar Future

Like many young women, Calista Lum absorbed the message that she was not as capable as her male peers when it came to science, technology, engineering and math. Teachers in her Fairfield high...

Postdoctoral Fellow Earns Best Presentation at International Conference

Deepti Chittamuru won the best abstract award — out of 700 abstracts submitted — at the 17th International Conference on Communication in Healthcare. She was also awarded the...

Lab Works to Understand Molecular Motors and Cholesterol’s Relation to Alzheimer’s

Professor Jing Xu and her students study extremely tiny motor proteins, but their work could make a huge contribution to the growing body of knowledge about Alzheimer’s and other diseases that...