Graduate Students

Sow and Grow Workshops Connect Smart Farm, Community

November 13, 2025

Photo depicts Ph.D. student Lynn Breithaupt holding up a native plant cutting.

On a chilly autumn morning at the UC Merced Experimental Smart Farm, about a dozen people enthusiastically dug/plunged their hands into soil in an exercise on how to propagate plants. For the less horticulturally inclined, propagating is the process of creating new plants from a single parent...

New Study Shows Patchy Resources Drove Evolutionary Changes to Body Size

Resource allocation isn’t just a problem for humans preparing a holiday dinner, or squirrels storing up nuts for the winter. It can actually affect the size of an animal or whether it...

Students Push ‘Give Tue UC Merced’ to Record Number of Donors

Goal achieved! UC Merced supporters turned out in force on Giving Tuesday with a record number of donors contributing to campus scholarships and fellowships. More than 1,300 individuals donated...

Students walk across campus at UC Merced

UC Merced Aims to Draw 1,000 Donors in a Day with ‘Give Tue UC Merced’ Campaign

Jose Nava-Mejia hopes to work in renewable energy after he graduates from UC Merced. That means every moment spent on his environmental energy courses is a moment invested in the planet’s...

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...

Water Yield from Forest Thinning Depends on How, Where and How Much

Even a little forest management significantly increases water runoff in the Central Sierra Nevada and other semi-arid regions, while drier forests need more extensive treatments, according to a new...

RadioBio art for episode on misfolded proteins cause human neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer's, ALS, and Parkinson's.

RadioBio Breaks Down Science Through the Airwaves

Audio has become a top form of entertainment over the past several years, in large part due to the rising popularity of podcasts. UC Merced graduate students are seizing the opportunity to help...

Physicists Revealing Mysteries of Biological Fluids

A group of physics researchers from UC Merced have revealed that a fluid made from biological molecules found in human cells behaves much like ordinary fluids that are mixed externally, such as paint...

Lauren Schiebelhut is putting what she learned at UC Merced to take her research career to the next level.

Alumna Tackles Eco-Evolutionary Research on the California Coast

Lauren Schiebelhut credits the support and opportunities afforded to her at UC Merced with opening the door to her research career. Schiebelhut — a first-generation transfer student from...

Applied Math — an ‘Oddity’ in its Field — Continues to Evolve at UC Merced

Math at UC Merced isn’t exactly like math at most other universities. Sure, there are parabolas and equations, orders of operations and cosines, but at this campus, those lead into topics...