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Professor’s Side-Blotched Lizards Become Latest Campus Inhabitants

October 26, 2021
Every faculty member has to set up their lab when they join a new campus. But Professor Danielle Edwards literally built a key component of hers from the ground up. The outdoor component of El Huevo — the Edwards Lab of Herpetology Uta Evolution Vivarium and Ovipositorium — is set on 1.2 acres...

HIV Preventative Developed in LiWang Lab Takes One Big Step Forward

October 20, 2021
An HIV-inhibiting silk film designed to advance prevention and help end the AIDS epidemic in countries in Africa, developed by UC Merced Professor Patti LiWang, has met recent success at the California National Primate Research Center at UC Davis. “They show complete protection,” LiWang said. “The...

Researchers Unraveling Mysteries of Electrosensory Gel in Sharks, Skates

September 28, 2021
Cartilaginous fishes such as sharks and skates have a sixth sense, but it’s not ESP — it’s electrosense. Such fishes use hundreds or thousands of specialized organs to sense prey and mates and to navigate the oceans. A cross-disciplinary group of researchers at UC Merced is making new discoveries...

Chemistry Lab Receives NSF Funding to Study How Proteins Protect from Dehydration

August 26, 2021
Like many people this summer, Professor Shahar Sukenik has dehydration on his mind. But it’s not the soaring outside temperatures prompting this focus. Dehydration has been a theme of his lab’s work for the past year, from understanding how seeds know when to germinate to a new grant to further...

Antibiotic Resistance Found in Insecticides Commonly Used in California

August 18, 2021
The over the counter, “safe,” organic-compliant insecticides people purchase at home-improvement stores could be causing a problem that goes far beyond the vegetable garden or farm field — antibiotic resistance. A new study from evolutionary geneticist Professor Mark Sistrom, postdoctoral...

Edwards Eager to Expand Father of Evolution’s Work

August 16, 2021
It has been 186 years since Charles Darwin collected the samples of the Galapagos Islands species that led to his explanation of how the diversity of life on Earth has evolved and forever changed the way we understand the world. During his five-week stay on the islands, Darwin collected dozens of...

Recent Ph.D. Grads Receive NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship

August 2, 2021
Quantitative Systems Biology Graduate Program alumni Kinsey Brock and Robert Boria were awarded Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biology (PRFB) from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Boria and Brock — both former members of paleoecology Professor Jessica Blois’ research group — graduated...

New AI Institute Expands UC Merced’s Smart, Sustainable Agriculture Effort

July 29, 2021
With a new $20 million federal grant, UC Merced becomes part of a multi-institutional research collaborative to develop artificial intelligence — or AI — solutions to tackle some of agriculture’s biggest challenges related to water management, climate change and integration of new technology into...

Postdoc Earns Prestigious NIH Fellowship to Expand Prion Disease Research

July 20, 2021
Postdoctoral Scholar Mikahl Banwarth-Kuhn was awarded a $205,140 National Institutes of Health Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Individual National Research Service Award (NIH-F32) to be distributed over three years. The purpose of the fellowship is to enhance the research training of postdoctoral...

Campus Wastewater Testing Offers COVID-19 Early Warning System, Establishes Protocols for the Future

July 8, 2021
COVID-19 upended life as we know it, especially among the science community. While some scientists rushed to develop a vaccine, others sought a better understanding of the virus, hoping to predict where the next outbreak might be in order to better contain it. At UC Merced, this included testing...

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