UC Merced Research

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As it is at all University of California campuses, research is the cornerstone of UC Merced. Innovative faculty members conduct interdisciplinary, groundbreaking research that will solve complex problems affecting the San Joaquin Valley, California and the world. Students — as early as their first years — have opportunities to work right alongside them, sometimes even publishing in journals and presenting at conferences.

Top Articles

Flames, the beach and the ocean are depicted in a scene from the January 2025 Palisades fire.
Pictures accompanying Professor John Abatzoglou's presentation on the 2025 fire season were blurry. That was intentional, he said, because so much about wildfire is unpredictable. "There's a lot that we know, and a lot we don't know," he said....
Depicted are two electric vehicle charging stations at UC Merced.
Many people with electric vehicles drive them to work during the day and then charge them overnight after returning home. But a simple reversal of that schedule could make it cheaper and easier to charge your electric car. That was the conclusion...

 

Research isn’t limited to labs with beakers and microscopes, though there are plenty of those here.

The list of UC Merced’s research strengths is long and includes climate change and ecology; solar and renewable energy; water quality and resources; artificial intelligence; cognitive science; stem-cell, diabetes and cancer research; air quality; big-data analysis; computer science; mechanical, environmental and materials engineering; political science; and much, much more.

The campus also has interdisciplinary research institutes with which faculty members affiliate themselves to conduct even more in-depth investigations into a variety of scientific topics.

Recent Articles

UC Merced Professor Christiana Spitzmueller
Black and Hispanic faculty members seeking promotion at research universities face career-damaging biases, with their scholarly production judged more harshly than that of their peers, according to a groundbreaking initiative co-led by UC Merced that...
Illustration for UC Merced home price database research
A groundbreaking database that tracks 13 decades of annual changes in U.S. home sales and rental prices provides a clearer picture of economic shifts through the 20th century and will be a valuable resource for homebuyers, housing policymakers and the...
Cognitive science robot experiment
In simulated life-or-death decisions, about two-thirds of people in a UC Merced study allowed a robot to change their minds when it disagreed with them -- an alarming display of excessive trust in artificial intelligence, researchers said. Human subjects...
Lab members Zabir Mahmud and Farzan ZareAfifi are pictured on either side of electrical engineering Professor Sarah Kurtz.
As California lawmakers consider a package of bills aimed at increasing the production of clean energy, a major question arises: How would we store all this new power? Storage is a vital issue because while the state can create plenty of energy through...
Lions consume a giraffe carcass in Ruaha National Park, Tanzania.
A group of UC Merced researchers modeled predation behaviors, as well as changes in those behaviors, among large carnivores, developing a new theory that will help biologists assess the health of various ecosystems. Department of Life and Environmental...
Illustration of hands reach out to each other.
Experiments conducted by UC Merced researchers find that people who perform good deeds are far more likely to be thought of as religious believers than atheists. Moreover, the psychological bias linking kindness and helpfulness with faith appears to be...
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