School of Natural Sciences

Open Arms, Open Skies: Students Welcomed at Spirited, Soggy Scholars Bridge Crossing

August 26, 2025

Spirits were high and futures bright while all else was soaked in a summer storm that made Tuesday morning’s Scholars Bridge Crossing, UC Merced’s traditional greeting to new students, a welcome unlike any before. Call them Thunder ‘Cats. The ceremony embraced about 2,000...

Mentoring Program Empowers Student Leaders

For senior Jessica Nguyen, UC Merced has fueled more than academic preparedness — it has sparked her fervent interest in civic leadership. Nguyen has been involved in the Women’s Program’s Lift While...

Campus Celebrates 10th Annual Leadership Awards

The 2015 UC Merced Leadership Awards were held this evening (April 30) at the Wallace-Dutra Amphitheater. Presented by the Margo F. Souza Student Leadership Center, the awards recognize and celebrate...

Chemist to Lobby for NSF Funding at Washington Event

Chemistry Professor Hrant Hratchian is part of a delegation of academics at the Coalition for National Science Funding’s (CNSF) advocacy day in Washington, D.C., today. Hratchian will show his lab’s...

Mapping Genomes of Pine Bacteria Yields Unexpected Results

UC Merced Professor Carolin Frank is helping figure out how a certain bacteria helps promote healthy tree growth by studying the bacteria’s genome sequence. In the new paper, published in the open-...

Grad Student Uses Math to Study Deadly Diseases

Graduate student Jason Davis doesn’t use a traditional lab to study prion diseases. Instead, he relies on computer modeling and applied mathematics. Working with Suzanne Sindi, a professor of applied...

Campus Celebrates UC Natural Reserve System on Protected Lands

Research, teaching and public outreach were all on display today at UC Merced’s celebration of the University of California Natural Reserve System’s 50th anniversary. The inaugural celebration of the...

Two Grad Students Earn Prestigious NSF Fellowships

UC Merced graduate students Theo Crouch II and Lauren Edwards recently were awarded fellowships from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). Jessica Ross...

Three Students Chosen to Further Carbon Neutrality Efforts

Three UC Merced undergraduates are the recipients of a new fellowship under University of California President Janet Napolitano’s Carbon Neutrality Initiative. Through the President’s Sustainability...

New Magnetic Resonance Lab Opens on Campus

Looking at molecules just got easier for UC Merced researchers, now that Professor Erik Menke, Professor Jason Hein and other colleagues have opened a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) lab. “It’s a...