Students

Student Finds Community and Purpose Through Culture and Literature

March 12, 2026

Student stands outdoors on the UC Merced campus holding a notebook and pen, looking off into the distance near a campus walkway lined with leafless trees.

Between classes at UC Merced, you will often find Padme James under the trees outside the Leo and Dottie Kolligian Library. What she studies there isn’t directly correlated to her classwork, but it connects her roots to where she hopes her future is headed. Instead of reviewing notes for a...

Chemistry Professor Tao Ye and his students gathered on campus.

Chemical Biology Lab Creating DNA-based Nanomachines that can Self Assemble

Professor Tao Ye and colleagues have received a $1.18 million grant from the Department of Energy to study how DNA molecules can arrange themselves into nanostructures that could form the basis of...

Innovate to Grow Coming to a Zoom Room Near You

UC Merced’s premier experiential learning expo, Innovate to Grow (I2G), is providing students, faculty and staff with a new set of experiences to learn from this year, as the event continues in...

Breast Milk Shows Promise for Treating COVID-19 and Protecting Babies

Health psychology Professor Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook and incoming grad student Jessica Marino have a new study suggesting that the breastmilk of mothers who have recovered from COVID-19 contains...

Campus Holiday Gift Drives Continue

UC Merced’s Staff Assembly, Community Engagement Center and the Office of External Relations are partnering to host a holiday gift drive to benefit local families. Faculty, staff and...

Solar panels atop campus buildings are just one factor in the campus's carbon neutrality.

Campus Reaches Carbon Neutrality Ahead of Schedule

After a lengthy and rigorous review by independent auditors, UC Merced can proudly announce it is the first public research university in the country to achieve carbon neutrality, two years ahead of...

Connection Between COVID-19 and Loss of Smell Uncovered by Research Team

About 70 percent of people with COVID-19 suddenly lose their sense of smell, although fewer of them seem to realize it, according to a new “living analysis” by a research team that...

Undocumented Bobcats Find Support on Campus and Through One Another

Being a university student is stressful on its own. Students who have an uncertain immigration status have an additional layer of worry. The nearly 600 UC Merced students with undocumented status...

New Precision Ag Project Would Help Farmers Measure Plant Moisture

One of the biggest challenges in managing crops, especially in large fields, is knowing how much water each section of a field needs. Determining that accurately is a cumbersome process that requires...

Researchers Seek to Understand Messy Proteins that are Critical to Cellular Function

Biophysical chemistry Professor Shahar Sukenik and the graduate students in his lab are trying to make sense out of what might seem to some to be chaos. They aim to better understand how a series of...