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

Chih-Wen Ni

Assistant Professor

Chris Amemiya

Professor

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

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

Michael Beman

Associate Professor

Microbial ecology and biogeochemical cycling in the oceans

Gordon M. Bennett

Associate Professor

Evolution of animal-microbial symbioses

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

Biogeography, evolutionary ecology, and comparative genomics.

Eva de Alba

Dr. Eva de Alba is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering. The de Alba Lab focuses on basic and applied research, learning from our studies on protein...

Associate Professor

Molecular and mechanistic bases of cellular processes essential to life from a biochemical and biophysics perspective.

Elizabeth (Betsy) Dumont

The goal of Dumont's research is to understand the evolution of diversity in form and function in animals. Her approach has been to synthesize...

Professor and Dean

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

Bercem Dutagaci

Assistant Professor

Molecular dynamics simulations and machine learning modeling of biomolecular systems with a focus on RNA polymerase dynamics, function, and spatial organizations.

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

Roberto Andresen Eguiluz

Assistant Professor

Understanding how molecular interactions and forces across several length scales affect function in biology

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.

Marcos García-Ojeda

Associate Teaching Professor

Discipline-Based Education Research, didactic methods, microbiology

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

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.

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

Aaron Hernday

Assistant Professor

Epigenetic and transcriptional networks and metabolic engineering of yeasts

Linda Hirst

Professor

Experimental soft matter physics and biophysics

Katrina Hoyer

Associate Professor

Immunological tolerance and auto-immune disease, regulatory T cells

Kirk Jensen

Associate Professor

Parasite pathogenesis and immunology, toxoplasma and host-immune responses

Shilpa Khatri

The focus of the Khatri Lab is fluid dynamics arising in the context of biological and marine phenomena, such as the transport of nutrients, organisms,...

Associate Professor

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

Sora Kim

I am interested with how organisms interact with their environment in both modern and ancient ecosystems. My primary tool is stable isotope analysis,...

Assistant Professor

Ecogeochemistry, interactions between environmental change and biotic response

Petra Kranzfelder

Assistant Teaching Professor

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

Changqing Li

Associate 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

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

Stefan C. Materna

Assistant Professor

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

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

Associate Professor

Evolutionary ecology of plant responses to environmental change

Victor Muñoz

Professor

Structural Biology, Computational Biochemistry and Protein Engineering: Protein Folding, Function and Disease; Molecular Mechanisms of Gene Expression, Fluorescence Biosensors, Molecular Diagnostics

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.

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 and Kamangar Family Chair in Biological Sciences

Molecular development of microbial communities, biofilm formation

Rudy Ortiz

Professor

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

Néstor Oviedo

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

Erica Rutter

Assistant Professor

Biomedical Image Analysis, Mathematical Modeling, Machine Learning, Cancer Treatment and Resistance

Ramen Saha

Associate 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

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

E. Maggie Sogin

Assistant Professor

Exploration into how microorganisms use molecules to interact with their eukaryotic hosts and their environment. The Sogin lab employs a cross-disciplinary approach that combines metabolomic and meta'omic analyses with experimental and computational analyses.

Joel Spencer

Professor Spencer seeks to to develop novel optical imaging and sensing systems for studying tissue regeneration, hematopoiesis, cancer, and beyond.

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.

Anand Subramaniam

Associate Professor

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

Shahar Sukenik

Assistant Professor

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

Michael Thompson

Professor Thompson is a California native, was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley (2007), received his Ph.D. from UCLA (2014), and was a postdoctoral fellow...

Assistant Professor

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.

Susannah Tringe

DOE Joint Genome Institute/Associate Adjunct Professor

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

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

Associate 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.

Professor Zoghbi, seated, and some of the students in her lab.

Lab Aims to Understand Transporter Protein that Protects Cells from Damage

May 19, 2022

Professor Maria-Elena Zoghbi and her lab are taking a closer look at a human transporter protein that acts as a cellular protector by relocating a molecule that has important antioxidant properties...

Quantitative and Systems Biology Ph.D. candidate Jessica Wilson won UC Merced's 2022 Grad Slam competition and heads to the UC final on May 6.

Jessica Wilson’s CBD Research Talk Advances Her to UC Grad Slam Final

April 26, 2022

UC Merced’s top 10 Glad Slam finalists went head-to-head earlier this month to share their research in three minutes, in a format meant to share their scholarly work in a manner that is accessible...

Finalists Compete for Grad Slam Champion Title April 8

March 31, 2022

UC Merced’s Graduate Division will host its annual Grad Slam competition on April 8, with graduate scholars presenting their research on topics ranging from the effects of cannabidiol (CBD) on high...