Professors Roger Bales and Martha Conklin arrived in Merced in 2003, the first non-administrative faculty members at UC Merced. They came with a vision: to create a research university that would serve California’s future.
Now, after more than 22 years of building institutions, mentoring and pioneering environmental research, Bales has retired from UC Merced.
When Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe arrived at UC Merced in 2009, she and her husband, Professor Teamrat Ghezzehei, were leaving major research institutions to join a brand-new campus in California’s Central Valley. It was a leap of faith — one made easier by the Sierra Nevada Research Institute.
More than 100 million land mines remain buried around the world, posing a threat in approximately 70 countries and territories, and killing or injuring about 5,000 people, most of them civilians, every year.
As the world’s geopolitical landscape shifts, nine scientists studying different aspects of warfare ecology from seven countries — Poland, Ukraine, Norway, Spain, the United States, Finland and Croatia — are warning against the growing deployment of land mines as countries bordering Russia withdraw from global conventions restricting their use.
A group of researchers at UC Merced has found that climate change means it takes about three months longer for California to recover from drought, and probably longer.
“Climate change has fundamentally changed the odds of getting out of drought. It has weighted the dice,” said Emily Williams, a postdoctoral scholar with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute. “This is happening because of warming in summer months, and a good portion of it is because of human-caused climate change.”
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.”
Being able to accurately predict how the climate will change in the future is one of the most important quests of our lifetimes. A key to better prediction is the fundamental understanding of how particles in the atmosphere are connected to climate and climate change. One way to do that is to better understand the interactions between desert dust particles and radiation — from the sun and the Earth's surface.
In the early days of building UC Merced, founding faculty member Teenie Matlock took on lots of tasks that were well outside her job description. Over the years, she expanded her service to the campus and UC in many ways, from designing and developing courses and majors to co-authoring foundational policies to spearheading new programs to serving in leadership roles.
Professor Rebecca Ryals has made campus history by being named UC Merced’s inaugural Presidential Chair in Climate Change. The appointment was recommended by her peers and Dean Betsy Dumont from the School of Natural Sciences in recognition of Ryals’ outstanding research, teaching and service.
Life and Environmental Sciences Professor Emily Moran and collaborators at several other universities are set to conduct a continental-scale analysis of climate change effects on tree reproduction.
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.
