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Physicist Liu Receives NSF CAREER Award to Create ‘Bacteria Treadmill’

December 10, 2020
Physics Professor Bin Liu has received a CAREER award for his research into a new micromanipulation technique to virtually hold freely moving microorganisms, essentially creating a “bacterial treadmill” to enable biological and medical studies of microorganisms in their natural state. He is the...

Pandemic Inspires Chemist to Open New Avenues of Research

December 1, 2020
Professor Michael Thompson doesn’t usually work in immunology or drug development. But his use of X-ray crystallography — research that visualizes the structures of protein molecules to better understand how they function — has taken him in a new direction. Thompson joined the Department of...

Researcher Examining CBD Effects on Metabolic Syndrome

November 24, 2020
About 35 percent of Americans have metabolic syndrome, a group of risk factors that raises the risk of cardiovascular disease — the leading cause of death in the United States. If you have three of these five issues, you have metabolic syndrome, according to the American Heart Association: High...

Berhe Honored with Prestigious AGU Medal and Fellowship

November 11, 2020
Soil biogeochemistry Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe has been recognized by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) as one of this year’s recipients of the Joanne Simpson Medal for Mid-Career Scientists. Two or three medals are given each year to “exceptional mid-career scientists who have made...

Meza Named First AMS Fellow from UC Merced

November 6, 2020
Professor Juan Meza, former dean of the School of Natural Sciences, has become the first Fellow of the American Mathematical Society from UC Merced. He is one of 46 Fellows inducted as part of the Class of 2021. The Fellows of the AMS designation recognizes members who have made outstanding...

Researchers Seek to Understand Messy Proteins that are Critical to Cellular Function

October 27, 2020
Biophysical chemistry Professor Shahar Sukenik and the graduate students in his lab are trying to make sense out of what might seem to some to be chaos. They aim to better understand how a series of floppy, malleable proteins function — or malfunction — inside cells. The work has earned Sukenik a $...

Grad Services Bolstered to Better Support Students Remotely

October 26, 2020
UC Merced’s Graduate Division provides many programs throughout the year to ensure students succeed academically, including faculty and peer mentoring programs, free tutoring, and social and well-being activities to help foster a sense of belonging and community. Given the unprecedented...

Virtual Summer Academy, Other Sessions, Reached Students Around the Country

October 21, 2020
Students and faculty worked with a record number of schoolchildren from Merced, the Bay Area and southern California all the way to Washington, D.C., enriching their learning and increasing their interest in science, technology, engineering and math. About 1,550 K-12 students, teachers and...

Hard Shells and Electrosensory Gels: Lab Makes Surprising Discovery

October 19, 2020
Molecular biology Professor Chris Amemiya and his former graduate student Molly Phillips have made a discovery that upends traditional ideas about a structural polysaccharide called chitin that is found in some fish. Over the course of their studies, they collected evidence that chitin — which...

New Project Focuses on Life in Soil in the Earth’s Critical Zone

October 6, 2020
Since 2007, UC Merced researchers have been extremely productive in the Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory (CZO), delving into investigations of hydrology, climate change, geology, biology and more. But the National Science Foundation, which funded the CZOs, is decommissioning the sites and...

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