Patty Guerra

Climate change is a very real - and very scary - threat.

Climate change and its underlying primary cause - burning fossil fuels - are arguably the world's leading causes of preventable death and ill health, writes researcher Edward Maibach.

However, there are tangible ways to limit global warming, and research shows that getting the message from the health care professionals who are on the front lines of dealing with the effects of climate change can have a big impact.

Understanding and conserving biodiversity, or the variety of life in ecosystems, is key to sustaining life on Earth.

A research project funded by NASA that is launching this week in South Africa, co-led by UC Merced environmental engineering Professor Erin Hestir, is aimed at better understanding the biodiversity of the region and providing new mapping tools that could be used on a global scale.

Water is the most valuable resource in the world. And it's a particularly important commodity in the Central Valley, historically a desert but also home to some of the richest agricultural soil on Earth.

The UC Merced Library and Secure Water Future co-hosted an event to discuss water policy in California, its history and what the future might look like.

Writing is still the most important, and most-used, form of communication in the world.

"Writing is crucial in that it's both a product and a process. It's in the fabric of what we do," said Paul Gibbons, teaching professor of writing studies at UC Merced. "Writing is a way of doing things in the world, of asking for things. It's still a major coin of the realm."

UC Merced researchers will tackle climate changes in multiple ways through more than $4 million in grants recently awarded from within the university.

The Office of Research and Economic Development (ORED) issued nine awards totaling $4,096,197 for proposals that range from studying methane gas emissions to making electronic vehicles more accessible to people.

Three UC Merced researchers have recently received the prestigious Hellman Fellowship.

Computer science and engineering Professor Shijia Pan, economics Professor Briana Ballis and life and environmental sciences Professor Xuan Zhang have all been named Hellman Fellows.

A UC Merced Materials Science and Engineering professor recently earned a prestigious award from the Army Research Office, a directorate of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory.

UC Merced public health Professor Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young has been awarded an R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The $3 million grant will fund Young's ambitious, five-year research project to understand how immigration policy influences health care access and the well-being of Latinos in rural California and Arizona counties, including Merced, Tulare, Imperial, Monterey and Napa.

UC Merced Computer Science and Engineering Professor Xiaoyi Lu is leading a collaboration that secured a $4.35 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) to improve federated machine learning systems.

UC Merced Computer Science and Engineering Professor Xiaoyi Lu is leading a collaboration that earned a $4.35 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) to improve machine learning systems.

Lu is partnering with the University of Iowa and Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago to improve the understanding of scalable, federated, privacy-preserving machine learning. The project was among five aimed at distributed resilient systems in science awarded a total of $40 million in funding from the DOE.