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School of Natural Sciences

March 10, 2025

UC Merced logo in blue and gold text
Each spring, master’s and doctoral students across UC Merced’s 18 graduate groups are invited to contend in the campus’s Grad Slam Finals. They are given three minutes and one visual slide to present their research to a panel of non-specialist judges. This year’s...
Incoming freshman Kyle Chun (mechanical engineering), third-year Daniel Baerwaldt (chemistry) and first-year Alejandro Lopez-Vaca (engineering) in front of their presentation.
Shortly before the fall semester kicked off in person, 11 students were wrapping up their first summer on campus as part of the FACTS summer bridge program. FACTS stands for San Joaquin Valley...
Professor Shahar Sukenik, center, with graduate students Eduardo Flores and Karina Guadalupe, investigate intrinsically disordered proteins.
Like many people this summer, Professor Shahar Sukenik has dehydration on his mind. But it’s not the soaring outside temperatures prompting this focus. Dehydration has been a theme of his...
From left, UC Merced faculty Lei Yue, Keith Thompson, Changho Kim, Professor Zenaida Aguirre-Muñoz and Mayya Tokman work on planning the new calculus effort with their teammates. Photo by Jim Chiavelli
More than a few students have probably asked themselves why they have to take calculus — the course is notoriously difficult for some. “People haven’t been taught math the way it...
Competitive Edge Summer Bridge participants and mentors
While the campus remained quieter than usual this summer, a group of new graduate students began their UC Merced journey earlier than the rest of their cohort. On July 6, 19 incoming grad students...
Professor Mark Sistrom
The over the counter, “safe,” organic-compliant insecticides people purchase at home-improvement stores could be causing a problem that goes far beyond the vegetable garden or farm field...
A Galapagos snake
It has been 186 years since Charles Darwin collected the samples of the Galapagos Islands species that led to his explanation of how the diversity of life on Earth has evolved and forever changed the...
Professor Nigel Hatton and student
The University of California Office of the President awarded three out of only seven UC-Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Initiative grants to UC Merced faculty members. The...
Quantitative and Systems Biology Ph.D. alumna Kinsey Brock
Quantitative Systems Biology Graduate Program alumni Kinsey Brock and Robert Boria were awarded Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biology (PRFB) from the National Science Foundation (NSF)....
A machine developed in Professor Reza Ehsani's lab improves almond harvests by reducing the amount of dust stirred up as the nuts are gathered from the ground.
With a new $20 million federal grant, UC Merced becomes part of a multi-institutional research collaborative to develop artificial intelligence — or AI — solutions to tackle some of...

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