At UC Merced, mercury is a regional challenge that student and faculty researchers have been tackling for several years. Mercury was used to extract gold during the Gold Rush in California, and the element was also mined at the New Almaden site, at one time the second-largest mercury mine in the world near today’s Silicon Valley.
Professor Rebecca Ryals has made campus history by being named UC Merced’s inaugural Presidential Chair in Climate Change. The appointment was recommended by her peers and Dean Betsy Dumont from the School of Natural Sciences in recognition of Ryals’ outstanding research, teaching and service.
It's time for the campus and the community to celebrate UC Merced’s high-level research during Research Week, March 6 through 10.
The annual research showcase, hosted by the Office of Research and Economic Development, kicks off with a Health Sciences Research Institute (HSRI) event titled “Climate, Environment and Health: Impacting the San Joaquin Valley and Beyond.”
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has given Professor Stephanie Woo the CAREER award to help her delve into congenital birth defects by looking at the embryonic cells of zebrafish.
Woo is the 32nd researcher from UC Merced to earn a CAREER award.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas that is contributing to irreversible climate change. Scientists know how to capture CO2, and they know how to transform it into useful molecules and materials.
But that transformation is neither energy nor cost-effective.
Through a prestigious grant from the Department of Energy (DOE), a diverse group of scientists, including a chemist from UC Merced, plan to address that problem by coupling two chemistries which are known to work independently, but don't work well together.
For the first time, UC Merced faculty members from each of the campus’s three schools have been chosen as principal investigators on some of the 21 exciting new projects that are being funded through UC’s Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI).
In addition, UC Merced researchers are collaborating on 10 of the other projects.
Christina Georges didn't choose UC Merced because of the opportunities she would have to conduct research as an undergraduate.
"When doing my own research on UC Merced in high school, I learned that UC Merced was a younger university," said the fourth-year biological sciences major from La Mirada. "I believed that being part of this university would allow me to grow with the university, as well. I was also intrigued by all of the student-run organizations on campus. I knew these organizations would give me the chance to be involved."
Graduate Division’s Competitive Edge Summer Bridge program for incoming Ph.D. students was identified as a Program to Watch by Excelencia in Education, a national effort to identify evidence-based programs that improve Latino student success in higher education.
Although climate change is still a very real challenge, the past decades of efforts to reduce the effects of human activities on the atmosphere have been potent enough to have thrown off the models scientists use to understand and forecast the atmosphere’s chemical composition and cleansing capacity.
Life and Environmental Sciences Professor Emily Moran and collaborators at several other universities are set to conduct a continental-scale analysis of climate change effects on tree reproduction.
