Diversity

Quantitative and Systems Biology graduate student Maria Mendoza was awarded a fellowship from the National GEM Consortium.

Delia S. Saenz, Ph.D., will join UC Merced as vice chancellor and chief diversity officer, after a nationwide search. She will begin this spring.

Chancellor Juan Sanchez Muñoz announced the appointment this week.

Professor Yehuda Sharim’s latest documentary, “ Letters2Maybe,” has opened to glowing reviews at the New Jersey Film Festival.

The film is based on events and dreams that took place in Houston and Merced from 2015 to 2020 and offers an intimate portrayal of those who refuse to surrender amidst daily devastation and culminating strife. It offers a vision for equality and a renewed sense of solidarity in a divisive country.

Founded by the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) in 1951, National Engineers Week is dedicated to ensuring a diverse and well-educated future engineering workforce by increasing understanding of and interest in engineering and technology careers.

This year, Engineers Week runs from Feb. 20-26, and to celebrate the students, faculty, alumni, programs and accomplishments, all nine UC campuses that have engineering schools or programs collaborated to present some of the most interesting stories from the past year.

“Letters2Maybe,” the latest film by Professor Yehuda Sharim with UC Merced’s Department of Global Arts Studies, premiers next week at the New Jersey International Film Festival and a second time at the Houston Iranian Film Festival.

“Letters2Maybe” focuses on the experiences of different immigrant activist groups across the Central Valley as they fight for immigrant rights and equality.

UC Merced’s Director of Pre-Law Studies Mark Harris is taking on a new position to help address racism at Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD).

Officials for the school district created a new position for Harris as district liaison to provide independent recommendations to the district on investigations and racist incidents.

A team of eight scientists from around the country is organizing a new project to foster belonging and participation among Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) students in the geosciences, supported by the National Science Foundation.

Paleoecology Professor Sora Kim is a member of the team that’s led by Professor Daniel Ibarra with Brown University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Science, and Professor Kimberly Lau with Penn State’s Department of Geosciences.

Their community college experiences occurred hundreds of miles apart, but Kim Arellano Carmona and John Wilson each found the support and inspiration that would propel them to Ph.D. candidate studies at UC Merced.

Now they both have a golden opportunity to give back as awardees of a fellowship program that has them shadowing community college mentors and, in the spring semester, teaching classes at Bakersfield College.

This time around, what happened in Las Vegas will not stay there — at least for Cathryn Flores. The fourth-year undergraduate, who's working on a major in English and minor in writing, reached yet another milestone in her music career as she attended a major Latin music awards show recently to be part of a social media team.