Quantitative and Systems Biology

Why QSB?

Quantitative and Systems Biology aims to accelerate the pace at which paradigm-shifting discoveries transform biology.

Masters of Discovery

Innovative By Design

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New Concentrations Available

QSB is the graduate program that focuses on the biological sciences. It is the largest graduate program at UC Merced, and, by design, is highly integrative and interdisciplinary. The QSB curriculum is largely tailored to the student’s needs and research interests, and the participating faculty comprise a broad cross section of expertise in the biological sciences. The program now offers degrees with elective concentrations in Molecular and Cellular Biology (including biochemistry, molecular biology, cell biology, developmental biology, immunology, microbiology, neurobiology, and physiology) and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. These elective concentrations appear on transcripts.

Accelerating Biological Discovery Through Innovation

Whether your passion is to reduce human suffering from disease, mitigate climate-change effects on ecosystems, or advance how we understand, explain and predict living systems, your career will benefit from the unique competitive advantages of a QSB degree.

Featured Faculty

Chris Amemiya

Professor

My laboratory is interested in the genetic basis and EvoDevo of vertebrate innovations.

Gordon M. Bennett

Assistant Professor

Evolution of animal-microbial symbioses

Betsy Dumont

Professor

Research focuses on understanding the relationships between morphology, behavior and performance in a variety of vertebrates including bat, carnivoran and avian species.

Roberto Andresen Eguiluz

Assistant Professor

Our research goal is to understand how molecular interactions and forces across several length scales affect function in biology. We are particularly interested in articulated joints and epithelial tissues to better understand molecular and cellular regulation in healthy biointerfaces and help identify the causes of diseases, such as osteoarthritis and lung cancer.

Marcos García-Ojeda

Associate Teaching Professor

Discipline-Based Education Research, didactic methods, microbiology

Arvind Gopinath

Assistant Professor

The focus of the Gopinath Lab is to combine experimental observations with minimal analytical models, phenomenological mesoscale theories and agent-based discrete computations to understand the origin of function in living matter at scales ranging from the molecular to multicellular.

Petra Kranzfelder

Assistant Teaching Professor

Discipline-Based Education Research, biology teaching and learning methods, entomology and aquatic ecology

Stefan Materna

Assistant Professor

Genomic control of gene expression, gene regulatory networks in organismal development.

Michele Nishiguchi

Professor

Host-microbe interactions and microbial ecology. My research as an evolutionary microbiologist spans the bridge between microbial ecology and the evolution of beneficial associations and is best known for deciphering the mechanisms for bacterial specificity that occur in animal hosts.

Joel Spencer

Assistant Professor

The Spencer lab is involved in engineering new optical imaging technologies and using these technologies to study, in vivo, the microenvironments and cellular dynamics within tissues.

Shahar Sukenik

Assistant Professor

Biophysical chemistry, structural biology; Understanding the interplay between proteins and their environment by combining biophysical methods and live cell microscopy

Mike Thompson

Molecular motion is critical for protein function, but it remains challenging to study the structural dynamics of complex molecules in atomic detail. My goal is to develop new types of structural and biophysical experiments that transcend the limitations of traditional techniques, allowing us to map structural interconversions at high spatial and temporal resolution.

David Ardell

The Ardell Laboratory at UC Merced is a computational biology lab that uses machine learning, data science and multi-scale theoretical models to...

Associate Professor

Computational biology and evolution of gene expression mechanisms

Miriam Barlow

Professor

Experimental evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria

Laura Beaster-Jones

Associate Teaching Professor

Discipline-Based Education Research--student self-efficacy and motivations

Michael Beman

Associate Professor

Microbial ecology and biogeochemical cycling in the oceans

Jessica Blois

Associate Professor

Terrestrial paleoecology, niche and community modeling and phylochronology

Wei-Chun Chin

Professor

Polymer physics and engineering of cellular and environmental systems

Michael Cleary

Associate Professor

Post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression during nervous system development

Michael Colvin

Classical molecular dynamics is the simulation of chemicals using the simplest atomistic model where each atom is a tiny mass with a charge interconnected...

Professor

Classical molecular dynamics simulations of flexible proteins and nucleic acids.

Michael Dawson

Professor

Evolutionary ecology, biogeography and phylogeography of marine invertebrates.

Eva De Alba

The de Alba lab studies the molecular and mechanistic bases of cellular processes essential to life from a biochemical and biophysics perspective. We...

Acting Associate Professor

The de Alba lab studies the molecular and mechanistic bases of cellular processes essential to life from a biochemical and biophysics perspective.

Danielle Edwards

The Edwards Lab studies how the environment shapes the evolution of phenotypes and behavior during divergence, speciation and diversification of...

Assistant Professor

Ecological, phenotypic, genomic and behavioral evolution of reptiles and amphibians; Conservation genetics/genomics

Ariel Escobar

Professor

Calcium in cardiac cellular signaling and techniques to study cardiac cells in vivo

Carolin Frank

It is now widely recognized that microbiomes dictate many traits of their host. For example, the plant microbiome can act as a second immune system,...

Associate Professor

Plant microbiomes; function, community assembly, transmission, and dispersal.

Xuecai Ge

We are interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms of neurodevelopment and its related diseases, focusing on the primary cilium, an antenna-like...

Assistant Professor

Cell signaling in neural development, brain tumors and neurological disorders

Ajay Gopinathan

Professor

Theory at the interface of biophysics and soft condensed matter physics

Juris Grasis

Dr. Juris Grasis leads a research team utilizing viral metagenomics to investigate viral ecology and evolution in host-associated systems. Further, the...

Assistant Professor

Viral metagenomics, systems immunology, microbiome regulation, viral/antiviral discovery

Stephen Hart

Professor

Terrestrial microbial and ecosystem ecology, plant-soil interactions

Aaron Hernday

Assistant Professor

Epigenetic and transcriptional networks and metabolic engineering of yeasts

Linda Hirst

Professor

Experimental soft matter physics and biophysics

Katrina Hoyer

Assistant Professor

Immunological tolerance and auto-immune disease, regulatory T cells

Kirk Jensen

Assistant Professor

Parasite pathogenesis and immunology, toxoplasma and host-immune responses

Shilpa Khatri

Assistant Professor

Numerical Analysis, Fluid Dynamics, Applied Math, Applications in Biology and Oceanography

Changqing Li

Assistant Professor

Cancer imaging, cancer therapy, fluorescence molecular tomography, x-ray imaging, biomedical imaging system and algorithm

Bin Liu

Assistant Professor

Transport of microorganisms in complex environments, mechanics of biological media and mechanical metamaterials

Andy LiWang

Professor

NMR spectroscopy, structural biology, biochemistry, molecular mechanisms of biological clocks

Patricia LiWang

Professor Patricia LiWang has been at UC Merced since 2008, and works on protein biochemistry and structural biology. Her work involves proteins that have...

Professor

The P. LiWang Lab uses protein biochemistry to study HIV prevention, HIV eradication, and anti-inflammatory strategies.

Gabriella Loots

Adjunct Associate Professor

Limb and skeletal development, genetics of bone metabolism, transcriptomics

Jennifer Manilay

Professor

Developmental immunology, cell fate regulation, hematopoiesis

Kara McCloskey

Associate Professor

Stem cell and tissue engineering for regenerative medicine applications

Emily Jane McTavish

Assistant Professor

Large scale evolutionary inference Data that can be used to answer evolutionary questions is being generated on unprecedented scales. How can we take advantage of evolutionary information in large data sets, in a way that is biologically informed, statistically rigorous and computationally efficient? We apply these techniques to data in a range of biological systems, from disease outbreaks, to cattle and humans, to the entire tree of life!

Emily Moran

Assistant Professor

Evolutionary ecology of plant responses to environmental change

Victor Muñoz

Professor

Our group’s research interests are on the areas of biophysics, structural/computational biology and synthetic molecular biology. Within this broad area we investigate the conformational and functional behavior of proteins (how they fold, bind, and function) with the combined goals of deciphering their mechanisms of operation and understanding their general design principles towards developing exciting engineering applications in the emerging field of bionanotechnology.

Chih-Wen Ni

Assistant Professor

Gene regulation in vascular development and genetic engineering

Clarissa Nobile

Research in the Nobile lab is directed towards understanding the molecular and mechanistic bases of microbial communities. We are interested in...

Associate Professor

Molecular development of microbial communities, biofilm formation

Rudy Ortiz

Professor

Insulin resistance; cardiorenal and metabolic disorders; comparative physiology of Northern Elephant Seals.

Néstor Oviedo

Associate Professor

Stem cell regulation, cancer and regeneration in planarians

Scott Roy

Assistant Adjunct Professor

Molecular evolution, gene/genome structure, intragenomic conflict, balancing selection, sex chromosomes and determination

Ramen Saha

Assistant Professor

Epigenetics of neuronal gene expression during brain development & function

Jason Sexton

Associate Professor

Plant adaptation, species range limits biological invasions and evolutionary conservation science

Suzanne Sindi

Associate Professor

Mathematical biology, dynamical systems and computational biology and bioinformatics

Mark Sistrom

Assistant Professor

We study evolutionary hypotheses in bacterial and viral systems using a combination of computational and laboratory genomic approaches

Paul Smaldino

Assistant Professor

Population dynamics, social and cultural evolution, self-organization, mathematical and computational modeling

Anand Subramaniam

Assistant Professor

Synthetic Biology, Soft Matter Physics, Colloid and Interface Science, Microfabrication and Microfluidics

Susannah Tringe

DOE Joint Genome Institute/Associate Adjunct Professor

Sequence-based approaches to studying microbial community assembly, function and dynamics

Christopher Viney

Professor

Biomolecular materials, biologically inspired material synthesis and processing

Axel Visel

Adjunct Professor

Human functional genomics and enhancers in development and disease

Zhong Wang

Associate Adjunct Professor

Applications of high-performance computing to big-sequencing data and machine learning

Fred Wolf

We are interested in how an animal with a specific history and internal state responds to cues in a stereotyped manner. We use unbiased phenotypic and...

Associate Professor

Genetic and neural coding of behavior in Drosophila

Stephanie Woo

Assistant Professor

Tissue morphogenesis, Control of cell migration and cell adhesion during development

Tanja Woyke

Adjunct Associate Professor

Research in the Woyke laboratory focuses on the utility of single-cell methods to access genetic material of uncultivated taxa of interest. One such effort is targeted at environmental cells that are from candidate phyla, major branches in the phylogenetic tree without cultivated representatives

Jing Xu

Associate Professor

Experimental biophysics, quantitative biology single-molecule analysis of molecular motors

Justin Yeakel

Assistant Professor

Animal foraging and food web dynamics over space and time

Maria Elena Zoghbi

Assistant Professor

Structural, biochemical and functional studies of membrane transport proteins

Our Research

The QSB graduate program trains students in quantitative and interdisciplinary biology research, with particular emphasis on Molecular and Cell Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Systems and Synthetic Biology, and Quantitative Biology and Bioinformatics.

Our Facilities

QSB researchers access top-notch facilities including the Stem Cell Instrumentation Foundry (SCIF), a shared high-performance computing (HPC) cluster for Multi-Environment Research Computer for Exploration and Discovery (MERCED), and a shared Illumina MiSeq.

RadioBio hosts GradStory, an event that takes place during research week to highlight graduate students’ research and their journey to graduate school.

RadioBio Receives UC President’s Award for Outstanding Student Leadership

July 30, 2020

University of California President Janet Napolitano has selected UC Merced student organization RadioBio as one of two recipients for the 2020 President’s Award for Outstanding Student Leadership....

More than 100 students participated remotely in the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Center's Summer Undergraduate Research Institute to develop critical research skills and prepare for graduate school.

Summer Research Program Continues to Serve Students Remotely

July 29, 2020

While the COVID-19 pandemic has kept most students and faculty mentors off campus, UC Merced’s commitment to providing research experiences to undergraduate students has not wavered. Over the past 14...

$3.5 Million Hellman Endowment Expands Future of Research at UC Merced

July 26, 2020

Since 2011, the Hellman Fellows Fund has provided close to 60 UC Merced assistant professors with much-needed research support in the form of seed funding. The prestigious Hellman Fellowship has...