Research

Avinav Biswas, a third‑year undergraduate majoring in biological sciences at UC Merced, has been named a 2026 Barry M. Goldwater Scholar, becoming the university’s first recipient of one of the nation’s most prestigious undergraduate awards for students pursuing research careers in science, engineering and mathematics.

The scholarship provides $7,500 annually to support tuition, fees, books and living expenses. It is awarded to students who demonstrate exceptional research achievement and promise, and who plan to pursue careers centered on scientific discovery.

Nervous but prepared, Tahirah Williams took the stage at UC Merced’s Grad Slam competition in March and delivered her three-minute talk, “More Than Slime: When Mucus Meets the Valley Fever Invader.” By day’s end, she had been announced as the university’s 12th Grad Slam Campus Champion.

UC Merced saw broad gains in the U.S. News and World Report 2026 Best Graduate Schools rankings with graduate programs rising in national standing, reflecting the campus’s growing academic and research profile.

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 and innovators who have been recognized this year for their distinguished scientific and social achievements.

Although the oceans are the least explored places on the planet, even their depths are not untouched by humans.

Drawing on more than 2,300 seawater samples collected across the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans, researchers found that hundreds of synthetic chemicals — many of them rarely monitored and originating from everyday products — are now woven into the fabric of marine organic matter.

Ten UC Merced graduate researchers are gearing up to deliver the most intense three minutes of their academic careers.

Each spring, master’s and Ph.D. students across the campus’s three schools are invited to participate in Grad Slam — a fast‑paced competition that challenges scholars to distill their cutting‑edge research into a crisp, engaging presentation for a general audience.

Applications are open for the 2026 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Data Science Challenge, a two-week summer internship that gives students a firsthand look at national lab research through high‑impact, data‑driven problem solving.

Our circadian clocks play a crucial role in our health and well-being, keeping our 24-hour biological cycles in sync with light and dark exposure. Disruptions in the rhythms of these clocks, as with jet lag and daylight saving time, can throw our daily rhythms out of whack.

But a group of researchers is getting closer to understanding how these clocks operate.

UC Merced biochemistry Professor Andy LiWang and his colleagues have solved how the circadian clocks in microscopic bacteria precisely control when different genes are turned on and off during the 24-hour cycle.

Chemistry and Biochemistry (CBC) Ph.D. candidate Abigail Gyamfi has earned the 2025 American Chemical Society Leader Scholars Award. The ACS Leader Scholars program recognizes outstanding undergraduate students, graduate students and early-career scientists.