Professor Shahar Sukenik has been a faculty member for only 5 1/2 years, but he has already built an impressive resume, becoming a leader in his research field, an innovator and an exceptional communicator.
Those qualities helped him become UC Merced’s first recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Sloan Research Fellowship.
A UC Merced researcher and her teammates around the world have succeeded in measuring the total amount of matter in the universe for the second time.
A new paper in the Astrophysical Journal, titled “Constraining Cosmological Parameters using the Cluster Mass-Richness Relation,” shows that matter makes up 31% of the universe, with the remainder consisting of dark energy — answering one of the most interesting and important questions in cosmology.
Professor Martha Conklin started her career at UC Merced at the Castle Research Facility, and it began with a frightening surprise.
“I had a baby rattlesnake in my office,” she said. “The whole building was snake-infested before UC Merced moved in. But it's a small thing — there were a lot of things to work out back then.”
Four UC Merced researchers will share in the new California Climate Action Seed Grants and Matching Grants, which are the result of an historic partnership between the University of California and the state of California.
The University today announced it is awarding over $80 million in climate action grants to spur implementation of solutions that directly address state climate priorities.
Solar films developed by a graduate student in the Department of Physics at UC Merced while on an internship at NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC) not only survived 10 months in space with minimal degradation, but the little damage they did incur was more than 90 percent reversible.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas that is contributing to irreversible climate change. Scientists know how to capture CO2, and they know how to transform it into useful molecules and materials.
But that transformation is neither energy nor cost-effective.
Through a prestigious grant from the Department of Energy (DOE), a diverse group of scientists, including a chemist from UC Merced, plan to address that problem by coupling two chemistries which are known to work independently, but don't work well together.
For the first time, UC Merced faculty members from each of the campus’s three schools have been chosen as principal investigators on some of the 21 exciting new projects that are being funded through UC’s Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI).
In addition, UC Merced researchers are collaborating on 10 of the other projects.
UCs Merced and Santa Cruz became the newest campuses in the system to be named an agricultural experiment stations (AES), UC President Michael Drake announced at today’s Regents’ meeting.
They are the first campuses in more than 50 years to earn the designation.
Like many other researchers, environmental engineering professors Erin Hestir and Joshua Viers are trying to quantify water use in California’s Central Valley.
The difference is, they are doing it from the sky.
Green energy solutions are critical to meet current and future power demands, and while solar and wind power are great, they are also site-specific and intermittent.
