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).
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 .
Paleoecology Professor Jessica Blois recently became the campus’s 19th recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award.
The NSF describes as the CAREER as its “most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their organizations.”
The award provides Blois with $782,449 over the next five years to pursue an agenda that includes research and outreach.
UC Solar received a $1.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) to develop solar-thermal desalination technologies that reduce the cost of creating fresh water from otherwise unusable waters such as seawater, brackish water and polluted water.
Soils are carbon sinks, storing more planet-warming carbon than the atmosphere and all animal and plant life combined.
But they can also release massive amounts of stored carbon into the atmosphere. Given carbon’s central role in climate change, understanding the forces that govern how soils absorb and release carbon is crucial.
In 2012, Environmental Systems graduate student Lauren Schiebelhut was collecting DNA from ochre sea stars living along the Northern California coast — part of an effort to study genetic diversity in various marine species that serve as indicators of habitat health. She had no idea that just one year later, most of the sea stars would be dead.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) just announced that they’ve selected Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe to serve as an inaugural member of the Academies’ newest initiative — New Voices in Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (SEM).
It reads like a mashup of Greek mythology and H.G. Wells. “The Odyssey of Doctor Moreau,” perhaps. Explorers find their way to a remote Aegean island and discover it’s inhabited by reptilian cannibals. They describe one encounter as follows:
“[I]t began to run away, with the dead lizard torso and head still in its mouth. The cannibal continuously ran along the top of a wall and paused intermittently to thrash the corpse against the cement.”
Local community members are invited to serve as citizen scientists at UC Merced’s next CALeDNA BioBlitz, scheduled for Sunday, May 20, from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. at the Merced Vernal Pools and Grassland Reserve. It’s an opportunity to get up close and personal with the local flora and fauna while contributing to cutting-edge science.
Three field trips this semester gave Professor Marc Beutel’s students an up-close understanding of biological wastewater processes used in treatment plants across the country.
Most recently, they toured the wastewater treatment plant in Oakland, operated by East Bay Municipal Utility District. The plant treats sewage for more than 685,000 people in the East Bay using a process called “activated sludge.” Bacteria convert organic waste to carbon dioxide and bacterial biomass (aka activated sludge), and once the bacteria settle out, the result is clean, clear water.
