Professor Sarah Kurtz has become the first UC Merced faculty member to be elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in recognition of her contributions to the development of gallium indium phosphide/gallium arsenide photovoltaic cells and for her leadership in solar-cell reliability and quality.
Bioengineering Professor Victor Muñoz has answered a long-standing genetic mystery, and his research suggests that someday, bioengineers could devise ways to control gene activity — manually switching off the genes that contribute to cancer, for instance.
“If this mechanism turns out to be as powerful as we anticipate, engineering it will be relatively straightforward,” Muñoz said. “Controlling the output of genes could be done in a targeted way by new genome editing technologies such as CRISPR.”
Competitions, showcases, career success stories and more highlight the work of the School of Engineering and its students at UC Merced’s annual celebration of National Engineers Week, Feb. 18 to 21.
E-Week is an opportunity for engineering students to share the work they do with the campus, invite some friendly competition and introduce other students and younger school children to the field. Each day carries a specific theme, from Project Palooza (a showcase for engineering clubs and organizations) to Professional Day (career advice and alumni success stories).
Professor Sarah Kurtz has become the first UC Merced faculty member to be elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in recognition of her contributions to the development of gallium indium phosphide/gallium arsenide photovoltaic cells and for her leadership in solar-cell reliability and quality.
Professor Joel Spencer was a rising star in college soccer and now he is an emerging scientist in the world of biomedical engineering, capturing — for the first time — an image of a hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) within the bone marrow of a living organism.
Not spending money on gas, oil changes, and tune-ups and not producing harmful greenhouse gas emissions is enough to sell many people on plug-in electric cars.
But many consumers won’t bite until they’re assured that electric cars can go the distance before needing a charge.
A thin layer of compost applied to grasslands could help fight climate change by capturing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in the soil, recent research shows.
UC Merced Professor Rebecca Ryals and a team of researchers, ranchers and public agencies will demonstrate this practice for the first time in the East Bay. The project, which began Dec. 3, is funded by a California Department of Food and Agriculture Healthy Soils Demonstration grant.
It’s a situation familiar to many UC Merced students: Having to translate for parents and other, older relatives who speak little or no English.
It can be especially challenging when what you have to translate is almost a language in itself — medical jargon.
A pair of UC Merced researchers are combining computational chemistry and machine learning principles to solve what seems to be an intractable problem at the heart of quantum mechanics: predicting the movement of electrons, also known as electron dynamics.
Like many young women, Calista Lum absorbed the message that she was not as capable as her male peers when it came to science, technology, engineering and math.
Teachers in her Fairfield high school engineering classes often asked if male classmates had done her work for her.
“I just assumed the boys were so much better at it than me,” she said.
