Scientists know the whats and whys of using light, heat and electricity to direct chemical reactions toward an end goal. What’s less well understood are the effects mechanical force can have on chemistry.
Thanks to a three-year, $1.8 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, a team of researchers — including mechanical engineering Professor Ashlie Martini — are forming a new center for this emerging area of study.
Change is everywhere at UC Merced this year, from hiring a new chancellor to the completion of a major campus expansion. The Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI), an early hallmark of research excellence at UC Merced, is also making a change: After a 13-year tenure, Faculty Director Professor Roger Bales has stepped down and Professor Tom Harmon is taking the reins.
Since 2011, the Hellman Fellows Fund has provided close to 60 UC Merced assistant professors with much-needed research support in the form of seed funding. The prestigious Hellman Fellowship has launched countless careers at UC Merced and across the UC system.
Now, thanks to a generous new $3.5 million gift from the Hellman family, UC Merced will permanently establish the UC Merced Society of Hellman Fellows starting in 2021. The endowment allows the program to continue in perpetuity, while affording the campus more flexibility in funding early-career research.
Maybe now more than ever, scientists need to understand the immune system.
A new National Institutes of Health grant is funding a cross-disciplinary collaboration between bioengineering Professor Joel Spencer and immunology Professor Jennifer Manilay that will allow them to watch as immune-system cells develop in the bone marrow of a living mouse to gain insights into how they work.
Bioengineering Professor Victor Muñoz has answered a long-standing genetic mystery, and his research suggests that someday, bioengineers could devise ways to control gene activity — manually switching off the genes that contribute to cancer, for instance.
Professor Joel Spencer was a rising star in college soccer and now he is an emerging scientist in the world of biomedical engineering, capturing — for the first time — an image of a hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) within the bone marrow of a living organism.
As the SPACEX Crew Dragon spacecraft left Earth today to ferry two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, many Bobcats were watching the live stream with keen anticipation.
It’s not just that the flight marks the first time a commercial aerospace company will carry humans — two NASA astronauts — into Earth's orbit. The collaborative project also has special meaning for UC Merced.
Mechanical systems, such as car engines and manufacturing equipment, use petroleum-based lubricants and solvents that are considered hazardous. After use, those compounds mostly end up in the earth.
Environmentally friendly alternatives — room-temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) — that don’t need solvents and can perform better haven’t been widely used because of a lack of basic understanding about how they work.
Many of the items people use in their everyday lives, from baby clothes and Halloween costumes to furniture, are doused with chemical flame retardants designed to make the items safer.
Theoretical physics Professor Ajay Gopinathan has been working over the past decade to model a submicroscopic mystery. Now, he and a team of colleagues have verified an important piece of the puzzle of how tiny, intrinsically twisted protein filaments responsible for repairing and growing cells know where to go to perform their function.
The work could someday enable scientists to control bacterial growth.
