Faculty

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

December 11, 2025

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

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 state’s most talented high school students a new destination for exploring advanced STEM...

Graphic Labels Discourage Smoking in Young Adults

Graphic cigarette warning labels are better at discouraging smoking in young adults than text-only labels, according to research recently published by a UC Merced professor. Health psychology...

Professor’s Fellowship Takes Her Into the Halls of Power

Like many faculty members, Professor Katrina Hoyer is busy running a lab, teaching and researching. This year, she adds another item to her to-do list – learning how public policy is implemented and...

Cog Sci Program’s Strength Shown at Conference

Cognitive and Information Sciences at UC Merced will be the top program represented this summer at the discipline’s premiere conference, Cognitive Science. There will be 25 presentations from the...

Founding Faculty Member Honored with NSF Grant for Excellence

A five-year CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation is helping Professor Alberto Cerpa develop the next big breakthrough in wireless sensor networks – an autonomous, self-learning system...

Grad Student’s Farmland Mapping Project Gets Prestigious Publisher

Working to map every square inch, UC Merced master’s student Andrew Zumkehr found there are 111 million acres of abandoned farmland in the United States. That’s a lot of space for growing biofuels...

Professor’s Work Earns Her a Spot in Prestigious Journal

Using some of the tiniest fossils in the world to help clarify how climate change is modeled has earned Professor Jessica Blois a big honor – publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of...

Science, Math Program to Offer More Paths to Aspiring Teachers

Armanti Hardesty is ready to join the next generation of teachers. “We’re all going into a more technological age,” said Hardesty, an alumnus from Long Beach. “It’s great to have new teachers...

Anthropology Lab Gives Students a Tactile Edge

With a growing collection of artifacts and replicas, UC Merced’s anthropology teaching laboratory gives students the ability to hold history in their hands. Students taking anthropology courses are...

UC Merced Sends Off Class of 2013 with Twin Ceremonies

This year isn’t the first time Maxine Umeh-Garcia has walked across the commencement stage at the University of California, Merced. She was part of the campus's graduating class in 2010. But this...