UC Merced is pleased to announce the selection of five Moore Foundation Postdoctoral Fellows, supported by a generous gift from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to strengthen postdoctoral recruitment and retention. These fellowships will enhance UC Merced’s ability to attract outstanding early-career scientists, deepen a strong mentoring culture across our research community, and advance discovery in key natural science domains. Moore Fellows will also be fully integrated into UC Merced’s campuswide postdoctoral programming administered by the Graduate Division, including professional development, grant-writing workshops, and teaching and leadership training.
Congratulations to the 2026 Moore Fellows:
- Derek Hollenbeck — Mechanical Engineering; digital twins, fluid mechanics, controls, and smart sensing with small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) for methane leak detection, localization, and quantification.
- Sourabh Kumar — Mechanical Engineering; mechanochemistry and multiscale modeling of force- and pressure-driven chemical processes using quantum chemistry and molecular dynamics simulations.
- Sobroney Heng — Molecular & Cell Biology; virus–host interactions in photosynthetic microbes, including cyanophages and microalgae-infecting viruses.
- Vivian K. Rojas — Biological Sciences; untargeted metabolomics to understand chemical exchange between bacteria and seagrass hosts and implications for coastal ecosystem function and resilience.
- Monika Sanoria — Physics/Applied Math–aligned; computational and theoretical modeling of active matter and collective dynamics, including how local cellular interactions drive collective migration and chemotactic instabilities.
