School of Engineering

UC Merced Breakthrough Could Transform How California Monitors Toxic Algae

July 10, 2025

Photo depicts Brittany Barreto Martinez pouring liquid into a test tube in a lab.

San Luis Reservoir in Merced County - one of California's largest artificial lakes - not only irrigates Central Valley farmland and supplies drinking water across Silicon Valley and the South Bay, but also draws swimmers, boaters and anglers year-round. Yet for months at a time, forest-green...

Professor Roland Winston and his student researchers

Our First Campus Was a Castle

The University of California, Merced, was established in 2005 — or so the story goes. The main campus officially opened in September of that year, but that particular reading of history elides...

Close-up photo of caucasian woman in glasses with short white hair.

Campus Voices: Partnering With Parks for Our First Research Institute

UC Merced is the only university with a research station in Yosemite National Park, and we have the Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI) to thank for that. Looking back, it’s hard...

A man in a blue jacket, blue jeans and sunglasses stands in a snowy forest repairing an electronic sensor device.

Massive Sensor Network Helps Scientists Monitor Mountain Water Resources

Scientists from the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, UC Merced, UC Berkeley and the USDA Agricultural Research Service have designed the first ever wireless sensor network (WSN) capable of...

Four female middle school students in summer robotics academy are gathered around a desk. All four students are sitting in front of laptops and writing code for their robots.

Summer STEM Academy Aims to Prepare Valley Students for College

The leap from high school to college is an enormous intellectual hurdle. But UC Merced engineering Professor Yanbao Ma wants to ease the transition by better preparing Central Valley students for the...

Study: Critical Sierra Meadows Being Overtaken by Forest

Subalpine meadows are among the Sierra Nevada’s most enchantingly picturesque landscapes. These sparsely wooded, grassy expanses are home to plants and animals found nowhere else, and they play an...

Blum Center Announces 2017 Seed Grant Recipients

UC Merced’s branch of the Blum Center for Developing Economies rebooted this spring with a faculty-led effort to spend two years working on becoming the hub for all food-security-related research and...

‘Swarmathon’ Robotics Team Competes at Cape Canaveral

Manuel Meraz transferred to UC Merced with a mission: to revive what had once been an award-winning, student-led robotics scene on campus. Meraz had just completed a robotics internship at the...

CREST Center Hosts Local Students for Science and Engineering Event

Students from Burbank and Peterson Elementary Schools in Merced participated in a day of interactive science and engineering hosted last month by UC Merced’s Center for Cellular and Biomolecular...

Campus Marks Largest Class, Year of Growth With 2017 Commencement

More than 1,200 undergraduate and graduate students are expected to participate in the University of California, Merced’s 12th commencement ceremonies this weekend — its largest class since opening...