2026 UC Merced Senate Committee on Research Award Winners

The UC Merced Academic Senate Faculty Research Grants program is designed to support the research of Academic Senate faculty by enabling their scholarly activities, including those that facilitate the pursuit of extramural research funds. Grants are awarded to help sustain and accelerate research productivity in the absence of other appropriate sources of research funding. 

Fred Wolf

Core Encoding Circuitry for Motivation in the Drosophila Brain

Lin Tian

Scalable Continuous-Variable Cluster States in Optomechanical Quantum Network for Quantum Information Processing

David Ardell

Unveiling the Organization and Evolution of tRNA and Other Non-Coding RNA

Gene and Gene Array Families in Long-Read Chordate Genome Assemblies

Teamrat A. Ghezzehei

Soil Structure as a Measurable Quantity: A Physics-Informed Information Bottleneck Framework for Knowledge-Discovery in Soil Science

Son Nguyen

Exploring the catalytic properties in metallic nanocrystals under interband transitions

Michael Dawson

Elevational genetic gradients in the sea

Chris Amemiya

Bio-inspired Proton Conductive Materials: Emergent Properties of Chitin in Shark

Electroreception

Andrea Merg

"Peptide Origami" : Folding Peptides into Artificial Proteins

Katrina Hoyer

Engineering Coccidioides with red fluorescent protein for anti-fungal screening, in vivo imaging, and host immune monitoring

Boaz Illan

Modeling for Sustainable Groundwater in the San Joaquin Valley

Roummel Marcia

Tensor decomposition for negative binomial intensity imaging

Stephanie Woo

Investigating Ezrin function in endoderm development

Stefan Materna

Control of tissue stiffness during assembly of the vertebrate left-right

organizer

Linda Hirst

Synthetic Active Fluids

Avinav Biswas, a third‑year undergraduate majoring in biological sciences at UC Merced, has been named a 2026 Barry M. Goldwater Scholar

UC Merced Grad Slam

Five School of Natural Sciences' Graduate students were finalists in this year's UC Merced Grad Slam competition.

Zahra Alitaneh: Quantitative and Systems Biology  

Harleen Kaur: Chemistry and Biochemistry 

Sarah Malone: Applied Mathematics 

Zachary Malone: Environmental Systems 

Tahirah Williams: Quantitative and Systems Biology 



Tahirah Williams won our the Grad Slam and went on to win the Systemwide UC Grad Slam with her talk, “More Than Slime: When Mucus Meets the Valley Fever Invader.”

Outstanding Graduating Senior Award Winners

Each semester the School of Natural Sciences recognizes exceptional graduating undergraduate students with ‘Outstanding Graduating Senior Awards’. Students are nominated and selected by the faculty who oversee their major. Awardees are selected based on criteria including academic excellence, achievements in research, service to UC Merced, and community service and outreach. This semester’s winners were recognized during an awards reception on April 27th.

Jacob Bates-Applied Mathematics 

Emily Solorio-Environmental Systems Science 

Alexander Glasgo-Physics 

Ashley Liao-Biological Sciences 

Siya Agrawal- Biological Sciences 

Kayla Kelly-Biological Sciences 

Rachel Kalthof- Biological Sciences 

David Smythe-Biological Sciences 

School of Natural Sciences' Staff Council

We are using this space to recognize a dedicated group of staff volunteers who work tirelessly to support the morale of SNS' staff. Despite their workloads, they organize gatherings and activities to give staff an opportunity to step away from their desks and enjoy an hour of fun and camaraderie each month. They also coordinate professional development opportunities as well as the annual SNS' Staff Appreciation Lunch.

Our Staff Council members are:

Jenn Souza

Vanessa Ortega

Chelsea Flannery

Sal Mejia

Stephanie Lopez

Beth Nelson

Renha Samra



Thank you, SNS Staff Council!