Lorena Anderson

The California Teachers Association (CTA) indicates the state faces a massive shortage of highly qualified teachers – especially those who can teach math, science and special education — and early childhood caregivers and educators.

Studies show these shortages disproportionately affect students in high-poverty, rural areas, students from low-income families and students of color, amplifying the persistent achievement gaps between those students and wealthier peers.

Psychology Professor Eric Walle ’s Interpersonal Development Lab will recruit local infants and mothers as an important and unique part of a large-scale study focusing on the development of young children.

Led by scientists at New York University and Pennsylvania State University, the Play and Learning Across a Year (PLAY) project involves 65 researchers across the United States and Canada and is funded by a $6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

If you’re an American with Internet access, you’ve probably done it. You get a headache, a sniffle or a mystery bruise, and instead of seeing your doctor, you consult “Dr. Google.”

According to some studies, more than 80 percent of Americans have used the Internet to “self-diagnose” health issues. UC Merced public health communication Professor Susana Ramirez’s new partnership with an eHealth startup aims to help people get quality information and find out what they do with it once they have it.

Chemistry and chemical biology Professor Ryan Baxter recently became the campus’s 22nd recipient of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) prestigious early CAREER awards for untenured faculty.

The $647,000 he received from NSF will mostly go toward paying student research assistants and purchasing supplies to help advance his lab’s work developing new strategies for initiating radical chemical reactions to engineer mild experimental protocols.

To further his fundamental research into solid oxide fuel cells and other high-temperature electrochemical energy systems, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded Professor Min Hwan Lee its prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award.

The grant brings the campus’s total to 20 recipients, but his award is the first for the mechanical engineering department.

Writing poetry can lead to increased innovation in science, according to a new article in BioScience that came about because of a Twitter connection between UC Merced and Swansea University in Wales.

Forty million years after dinosaurs went extinct, one of the largest predators that ever prowled Earth’s oceans emerged, feeding the imaginations of modern scientists and the nightmares of modern movie audiences.

Megalodon — the name means ‘giant tooth’ — appeared some 23 million years ago and reigned the seas for about 21 million years. In 400 million years of shark evolution, megalodon is the most massive shark species that ever lived, growing to 60 feet long, or three times the size of the largest of today’s great whites.

Civil and environmental engineering Professor Erin Hestir’s proposal for a unique system of mapping mercury in the waters of the San Francisco Delta has won her and her team of collaborators a $1.7 million grant from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW).

Even if some members of a goal-driven group don’t seem to work well with others — even if the whole group is extremely frustrated — the group can still compromise and find new ways to produce a successful outcome.

California aims to lead the nation — and the globe — in climate change research, policy and action — in large part through climate-focused research conducted at University of California campuses and labs.

Some of that research, including from UC Merced, will be on display this week as climate-change scientists, policymakers and trailblazers from around the globe gather in San Francisco for the 2018 Global Climate Action Summit .