Nervous but prepared, Tahirah Williams took the stage at UC Merced’s Grad Slam competition in March and delivered her three-minute talk, “More Than Slime: When Mucus Meets the Valley Fever Invader.” By day’s end, she had been announced as the university’s 12th Grad Slam Campus Champion.
“It feels...
News
April 7, 2026
UC Merced saw broad gains in the U.S. News and World Report 2026 Best Graduate Schools rankings with graduate programs rising in national standing, reflecting the campus’s growing academic and research profile.
UC Merced’s School of Engineering broke into the top 100 in the rankings, securing No....
March 26, 2026
Professors Asmeret Asefaw Berhe and Ming-Hsuan Yang have been named 2025 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals.
They are among the nearly 500 scientists, engineers and...
March 23, 2026
UC Merced’s CalTeach program is opening new pathways for younger students to experience hands-on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) learning, academic support and early exposure to a college environment.
The CalTeach program, present at every UC campus that offers undergraduate...
March 18, 2026
On most days, Reo Maynard’s life swings between two ecosystems: the microscopic world inside an ant’s gut and the sprawling one that stretches from Fresno to the Sierra Nevada mountains.
The 51-year-old Navy veteran, dad of two, screenwriter-in-waiting and newly minted Fresno City College faculty...
March 17, 2026
Temperatures in the 90s are nothing new to the northern San Joaquin Valley. But having them in March, as expected this week, is unusual and potentially dangerous.
An exceptionally strong ridge of high pressure will bring record-breaking heat to the entire region, the National Weather Service said....
March 16, 2026
Although the oceans are the least explored places on the planet, even their depths are not untouched by humans.
Drawing on more than 2,300 seawater samples collected across the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans, researchers found that hundreds of synthetic chemicals — many of them rarely...
March 11, 2026
UC Merced has received a $1 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to strengthen postdoctoral fellowships and expand research in the natural sciences. Awarded through the foundation’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Commitment, this distinction places UC Merced among just 30 leading...
March 9, 2026
Ten UC Merced graduate researchers are gearing up to deliver the most intense three minutes of their academic careers.
Each spring, master’s and Ph.D. students across the campus’s three schools are invited to participate in Grad Slam — a fast‑paced competition that challenges scholars to distill...
February 18, 2026
High-risk conditions for fires are increasingly happening across countries at the same time, making wildfires even more challenging to tackle, new research reveals.
Scientists from UC Merced and the University of East Anglia found this synchronized extreme fire weather — characterized by...
