Research

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...

A thin layer of compost is applied to grasslands in the Altamont Hills. This practice of carbon farming has been identified by the state as a pillar of its approach to fighting climate change.

Research Partnership Uses Compost to Tackle Climate Change

A thin layer of compost applied to grasslands could help fight climate change by capturing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in the soil, recent research shows. UC Merced Professor...

Researchers Aim to Solve the Unsolvable to Predict the Unseeable

A pair of UC Merced researchers are combining computational chemistry and machine learning principles to solve what seems to be an intractable problem at the heart of quantum mechanics: predicting...

Materials Science Researcher Honored with CAREER Award

Professor Yue ‘Jessica’ Wang, with the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation CAREER award, the 25th...

Researchers Look to Wetlands to Increase Delta Water Quality

UC Merced Professor Peggy O’Day hopes to improve water quality in the California Delta by studying local wetlands. O’Day is leading a new three-year study of Merced County wetlands...

Lab Works to Understand Molecular Motors and Cholesterol’s Relation to Alzheimer’s

Professor Jing Xu and her students study extremely tiny motor proteins, but their work could make a huge contribution to the growing body of knowledge about Alzheimer’s and other diseases that...

Physicist Found His Path to the Future at UC Merced

When Denzal Martin started his undergraduate work at UC Merced, he wasn’t thinking about a career in physics, interning with NASA or attending graduate school. The Los Angeles native was...

Water Yield from Forest Thinning Depends on How, Where and How Much

Even a little forest management significantly increases water runoff in the Central Sierra Nevada and other semi-arid regions, while drier forests need more extensive treatments, according to a new...

CCBM Bringing High-Powered Speakers for Two-Day Workshop

The NSF-CREST Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Machines (CCBM) at UC Merced is hosting a two-day workshop entitled “Emerging Themes in Cellular and Biomolecular Machines” on campus...

Events at UC Merced Highlight Transition to Open Access of Research Articles

The global push to share knowledge openly, rather than keep research locked behind costly paywalls, is the focus of a series of events at UC Merced to mark International Open Access Week, starting...