School of Natural Sciences

Two UC Merced Researchers Among This Year’s AAAS Fellows

March 26, 2026

The sign reads University of California, Merced

Professors Asmeret Asefaw Berhe and Ming-Hsuan Yang have been named 2025 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals. They are among the nearly 500 scientists, engineers...

New Major Teaches How to Tackle Questions of Ethics in Science, Tech

Should a scientist who sees signs of global catastrophe sound an early alarm or wait until more conclusive evidence is in? Does going public lead to swifter action or give naysayers more time to...

Spectroscopy at the UC's W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii helped the researchers interpret complex data about ultramassive galaxies. Photo courtesy of the W.M. Keck Observatory.

Astronomers Reveal Hidden Activity in the Early Universe’s Most Massive Galaxies

An international team of astronomers has studied ultramassive galaxies - galaxies containing more than 100 billion stars - as they existed when the universe was less than 2 billion years old. The...

Student speaker at 2024 UC Merced Fall Commencement

Fall Commencement Graduates Urged to Write Their Own Story

A beaming Jesus Cevon-Gonzalez stood on Merced’s Main Street, surrounded by his mom and dad, grandparents, sister and other loved ones. He clutched the proof of a freshly bestowed...

High school students will have a wider array of research opportunities through COSMOS starting next summer.

COSMOS Expands to UC Merced, Opening Doors for California’s Brightest Young Scientists

Starting next summer, UC Merced will join an elite group of University of California campuses hosting COSMOS — the California State Summer School for Math and Science — giving some of the...

Female with brown hair in cream turtle neck top in front of building

Doctoral Student Secures New Fellowships to Support Computational Modeling Research

Physics Ph.D. candidate Arabi Seshappan added two prestigious fellowships to her curriculum vitae: the Chateaubriand Fellowship in Science, Technology, Engineering Mathematics & Biology-Health...

Two UC Merced students smiling at the camera

Giving Tuesday at UC Merced: Collective Generosity Transforms Lives

When UC Merced launches Give to UC Merced 2025 on Dec. 2, it won’t just be about one day of giving; the month-long campaign will be about hope, opportunity and community impact. For the 12th...

three stages of cotton textile composting

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

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...

UC Merced Chemist Wins DOE Award to Simulate Electron Motion at Quantum Speeds

Chemistry Professor Henrik Larsson has received a prestigious Early Career Award from the U.S. Department of Energy, becoming the first faculty member from UC Merced’s School of Natural...

Unraveling Cancer’s Neural Connections: NIH-Funded Study Investigates How Stem Cell Regulation Influences Tissue Renewal, Cancer Development

The same cellular renewal that keeps our bodies healthy might also fuel the growth of cancer. A UC Merced biologist has found that the brain could hold the key to stopping it. Professor Néstor...