When Alyssa Young returned to Long Beach after earning her bachelor’s degree in psychology from UC Merced in 2017, she didn’t imagine she would be back in Merced just one year later.
It’s a new school year, which also happens to be a new chapter of the UC Merced Writing Project.
The UC Merced Writing Project is a local affiliation of the National Writing Project, which aims to improve writing skills among students as well as the art of teaching writing among educators.
The National Writing Project’s mission is to enhance student achievement by improving the teaching of writing, and therefore learning, in the nation’s schools.
Imagine blending economics, psychology, and neuroscience to pioneer new ways to think about human behavior.
Behavioral economist Colin Camerer does just that and was honored as the recipient of the 12th annual Distinguished Cognitive Scientist award on Monday. Bestowed by UC Merced’s Cognitive and Information Sciences department, this award honors researchers who have made game-changing contributions to the study of mind, brain, and behavior.
Complex societies produce people with more varied personalities.
That’s the surprising finding of a cognitive science study that attempts to understand how people develop into who they are: social and ecological environments in which we develop have a lot to do with it.
California’s drought was hard not to notice — the dry lawns, fallowed fields and hot temperatures were evident across the state. To better understand how the drought affected the natural ecosystem in which we live, biology Professor Jason Sexton and his graduate students conducted a study on a California plant known only from the Sierra Nevada — the cut-leaf monkey flower.
Harrison Duran has always wanted to discover ‘the land before time,’ and his desire to dig up dinosaur bones led him to the Badlands of North Dakota, where Alice the Triceratops was waiting for him.
Anne Zanzucchi has worn many different hats in her 14 years at UC Merced and now she is preparing to enter her newest role as associate dean for Student Services and Academics for the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts (SSHA).
What is art’s place in turbulent times? How does an immigrant live and thrive in a host country with laws that render one’s existence alien? And how does one continue to see beauty even in the face of grave injustice?
A social movement’s cause can be as diverse as the people who spur it in the first place —examples abound, from community organizations initiating struggles for neighborhood sidewalks and clean water to national level mobilizations led by labor unions and their allies against the privatization of education and healthcare.
But how do social movements get started? And why do some last while others wither? Ask Professor and Department of Sociology Chair Paul Almeida.
The rate of smoking in the San Joaquin Valley is the highest in California — on par with tobacco-producing regions in Georgia and South Carolina — and UC Merced’s Nicotine and Cannabis Policy Center (NCPC) is determined to change that.
