UC Merced said “welcome” to its 2,400 new students Tuesday as only UC Merced can, with a joyous and colorful Scholars Bridge Crossing ceremony that symbolizes their transformation into Bobcats at the San Joaquin Valley’s only research university.
Hundreds of those first-year or transfer students gathered in yellow T-shirts on the lawn next to the Pavilion dining hall in preparation for the crossing.
This is part of a series of profiles of new UC Merced Bobcats enrolled for the fall 2024 semester.
San Joaquin Valley native Anmol Kaur is well on her way to making a splash in the worlds of science and medicine. The Bakersfield resident, coming to UC Merced as a first-year student, parlayed strong experiences in high school into a slot in the second SJV PRIME+ medical education cohort.
Kaur is poised to follow a path taken by her parents, who both have careers in medicine.
A study of fast-tracked government funds for relief during the COVID-19 pandemic uncovered bottlenecks at federal, university and community levels that undermined partnerships. Researchers, including UC Merced Professor Nancy Burke , made several recommendations to strengthen financial partnerships that underlie community-based participatory research.
It’s spring break 2009 and Jane Lawrence is rushing across campus, the words from the phone call still ringing in her ear. The unimaginable is happening and she must tell Charles Nies,
First Lady Michelle Obama is coming to UC Merced as commencement speaker.
Lawrence, the vice chancellor for student affairs, finds her associate vice chancellor in his office. With the campus quiet and students gone home, Nies had brought his two young daughters to work.
“Flora,” a film by UC Professor Yehuda Sharim, earned an award from the Latino and Native American Film Festival.
The film, which Sharim describes as a memoir of post-teen daughters of immigrants who must teach themselves about love and tenderness in a world dominated by unnecessary suffering and pain, won the festival’s Environmental, Social, Economic, Political Justice Award.
UC Merced’s Nicotine and Cannabis Policy Center has earned multiyear funding to continue its mission to embolden community partners and share policy-influencing data in the long battle against the pervasive use of tobacco and other inhalants in underserved San Joaquin Valley and foothill populations.
Fernando Malagon and his mom stood at the head of a line for guided tours of the university he plans to attend this fall. The informational stroll around UC Merced would be more for her than for him; he visited the campus five years ago on a seventh-grade field trip from Modesto.
Of course, the university has grown since then, not just in square footage but in opportunity and possibility.
It was a terrible trifecta: a busted tilt skillet, an obsolete replacement part and thousands of hungry students restarting classes in six days.
For a UC Merced Dining Services team facing a logistical kitchen nightmare, the solution was a savory mix of collaboration and outside-the-pizza-box thinking. And it happened barely 12 giant steps from the broken cooker in the Pavilion dining center.
In a thick rainforest in Papua New Guinea, they're tracking bats. Researchers glue radio transmitters to the creatures’ little, furry bodies, then wait. And wait. When a bat flits to another position, the humans sprint through the foliage, stop and take a reading.
It’s 1 a.m. The researchers will do this all night, running from spot to spot, triangulating the bats’ movements. Logging data.
Having a blast.
“It’s just fun, right?” Betsy Dumont said, recounting a moment lived on the way to becoming one of the world’s top bat biologists. “It’s hard and it’s fun.”
It was a terrible trifecta: a busted tilt skillet, an obsolete replacement part and thousands of hungry students restarting classes in six days.
For a UC Merced Dining Services team facing a logistical kitchen nightmare, the solution was a savory mix of collaboration and outside-the-pizza-box thinking. And it happened barely 12 giant steps from the broken cooker in the Pavilion dining center.
