Like many young women, Calista Lum absorbed the message that she was not as capable as her male peers when it came to science, technology, engineering and math.
Teachers in her Fairfield high school engineering classes often asked if male classmates had done her work for her.
“I just assumed the boys were so much better at it than me,” she said.
It’s a situation familiar to many UC Merced students: Having to translate for parents and other, older relatives who speak little or no English.
It can be especially challenging when what you have to translate is almost a language in itself — medical jargon.
Harvesting is said to be one of the most costly and labor-intensive operations in strawberry production.
But a UC Merced engineering researcher is looking for ways to make it easier and cheaper. As part of a four-year project, Professor Reza Ehsani will explore the possibilities and benefits of people and robots picking the fruit together.
Two UC Merced physics groups are totally spacing out this year.
Professors Sayantani Ghosh and David Strubbe and their students in the Department of Physics are working on a NASA initiative to fabricate solar cells in space and turn sunlight into electricity.
Developmental biologist Professor Anna Beaudin and her lab are making breakthrough discoveries in a growing field of research that could lead to exciting developments in such medical puzzles as cancer treatments, regenerative medicine and the cause of autism.
She examines the mechanisms of how distinct blood stem cells are established during fetal development, how and why they give rise to the cells that make up human immune systems, how these cells work and what happens when something goes wrong.
Soil is one of the foundations of life on Earth and could be an important part of the solution to climate change, if only we can stop treating it like dirt.
The American media lends too much weight to people who dismiss climate change, giving them legitimacy they haven’t earned, posing serious danger to efforts aimed at raising public awareness and motivating rapid action, a new study shows.
While it is not uncommon for media outlets to interview climate change scientists and climate change deniers in the same interviews, the effort to offer a 360-degree view is creating a false balance between trained climate scientists and those who lack scientific training, such as politicians.
One of the pillars of UC Merced is service and giving back to the community.
Now the university, Yosemite National Park and partners in the region are offering a new program to help a group of people who gave back in advance — those who served in the military and now qualify for GI Bill benefits.
Climate change is bad news for forests, and a new study by UC Merced Professor Emily Moran demonstrates one aspect of that news.
Higher summer temperatures hurt tree seedlings’ growth and survival.
But whether that is entirely bad depends on the degree of change in the number of young trees.
At the northern tip of the UC Merced campus, an unremarkable aluminum gate leads into a field that extends, seemingly, into infinity. Perpendicular to the gate, the LeGrand Canal, drawn from Lake Yosemite, snakes around campus into the emerald pastures, through farm rows and almond orchards across the highway. It’s the rainy season and bulbous cumuli foreground the rippled line of the Sierra Nevada that slices across the open sky.
