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Professor Danielle Edwards
Edwards Eager to Expand Evolution’s Work
It has been 186 years since Charles Darwin collected the samples of Galapagos Islands species that led to his explanation of how the diversity of life has evolved, forever changing how we understand the world.
One such sample, of a small, brownish-gray snake, is the subject of a project by evolutionary biology and conservation genetics Professor Danielle Edwards and her research group. Edward and her team are proposing to genetically sequence the same of the snake, which, following Darwin’s work, was named the Floreana racer.
“We want to effect ecosystem restoration on Floreana Island by finding an evolutionary replacement in the ecosystem for that species,” Edwards said. “To do this, we will sequence Darwin's specimen to understand the identity of the specimen relative to the populations present on other islands. We can then use the closest genetic relative to repopulate Floreana Island with this key predator.”
Edwards recently got a 2020–21 Research Publication Grant in Engineering, Medicine, and Science Grant through the American Association of University Women (AAUW) to study Galapagos snakes.
Edwards, who joined the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences in the School of Natural Sciences in 2015, focuses most of her research on how the environment impacts the evolution of ecological niche, phenotype and behavior in reptiles, mostly in the context of how these changes lead to the development of new species. She applies this research to inform conservation management strategies for endangered and vulnerable reptiles and amphibians.
Sierra Nevada Research Institute
SNRI
Climate change, water, wildfire, air, soil and water pollution, drought, sustainability, natural resources management and competing land uses — all of these are topics being studied by researchers in the Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI).
SNRI, which was UC Merced’s first established research institute, now has more than 60 affiliated faculty members and researchers examining local, regional and global issues. Part of SNRI’s mission is sharing information, data analysis and research results with policy makers, resource managers and public and private stakeholders to help them make fully informed decisions.
Engineering researchers work closely with colleagues and research groups on campus in other disciplines, including management of complex systems, cognitive science, UC Water, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and UC Solar. They also work with regional partners such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and local, state, and federal agencies, as well as colleagues around the world.
UC Merced Faculty Land Three
UC-HBCU Grants, Most in System
The University of California Office of the President awarded three out of only seven UC-Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Initiative grants to UC Merced faculty members.
Soil biogeochemistry Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe and environmental physics Professor Teamrat Ghezzehei received the campus’s largest award — $328,710 — for their submission, titled “Boosting Representation of African Americans in the Geosciences (BRAAG).” The three-year pathways grant in collaboration with HBCU partners from Kentucky State University, Tennessee State University and Howard University will help support summer research and graduate admission.
“Our partnership is based on robust evidence that shows summer research programs and internships can positively affect the participation of minoritized scholars in geosciences,” Berhe said.
Professors Suzanne Sindi and Erica Rutter, female mathematicians in a majority female Applied Mathematics department, received a $78,000 UC-HBCU Initiative grant to address the critical need to increase the participation of Black students in data and computational sciences by establishing a Summer Research Internship Program with Benedict College, a private, historically Black co-educational liberal arts institution in South Carolina.
“The implications of the lack of representation in data science have far-reaching consequences for equity beyond the field, as algorithms created by data-scientists for many disciplines often perpetuate and encode racial biases,” Sindi said. “The pandemic has brought the statistical and mathematical analyses of diseases to the forefront. Our proposal will leverage this extra attention to recruit students from Benedict College to the internship program and then, hopefully, to graduate studies at UC Merced.”
The initiative has fostered faculty partnerships with HBCUs to support enhanced diversity and representation of Black scholarship in graduate education and the professoriate since 2017.
Teamrat Ghezzehei
Erica Rutter
Suzanne Sindi
Our partnership is based on robust evidence that shows summer research programs and internships can positively affect the participation of minoritized scholars in geosciences.
Asmeret Asefaw Berhe
Asmeret Asefaw Berhe
NASA Merced nAnomaterials Center for Energy and Sensing
MACES
The Merced nAnomaterials Center for Energy and Sensing (MACES) is an exciting NASA-supported research endeavor in which possibilities are as limitless as the universe itself. The center’s faculty and students collaborate with NASA scientists to push the envelope in materials innovation for expanding the possibilities in space exploration and Earthly endeavors. MACES has established a strong track record in educating and training students by providing more than 200 student fellowship awards while also enabling cutting-edge collaborative research, supporting more than 15 research projects. In the first episode of the Building the Future docuseries, we share the story of UC Merced’s collaboration with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on the Mars 2020 mission and explore the potential for life on the Red Planet. View the video to learn how research from the Fundamental Tribology Lab at UC Merced is supporting the safety and success of NASA’s mission to Mars.
From Earth to Space and
Back Again: Solar Samples Show
Surprising Results
MACES, Professor Sayantani Ghosh,
grad student William Delmas
Professor Sayantani Ghosh and physics graduate student William Delmas are part of the NASA-funded Merced nAnomaterials Center for Energy and Sensing (MACES). MACES training includes internship opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students at the various NASA centers. In summer 2021, Delmas analyzed materials he had made that made a round trip to the International Space Station. Delmas created samples of solar energy harvesting perovskite films during a NASA internship in 2019. Perovskites have properties that allow them to perform as high-efficiency, light-harvesting active layers in solar cells. They are cheaper and easier to produce than the prevalent solar modules. “One of the big challenges with traditional solar cells is that they are heavy, and NASA has been building them on Earth and then taking them into space,” Ghosh said. “For long-term missions to be successful, it will be necessary to have the capacity for efficient, inexpensive and large-scale in situ fabrication in microgravity.” NASA sent Delmas’ samples to the ISS. Hybrid perovskites are vulnerable to moisture and oxygen, structurally degrading over time, so NASA needed to know if they would survive a trip. “I’m surprised at how well the samples did,” Ghosh said. “We can see a few small spots of degradation, but not at all what we were expecting.” Delmas said they expected catastrophic degradation, but the films were still usable. “This is really promising,” he said.
NSF CREST Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Machines
CCBM
The NSF CREST Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Machines brings together more than a dozen faculty members from multiple units across campus, including bioengineering, physics, chemistry and chemical biology, and materials science and engineering. Researchers are studying how biological matter like proteins or cells come together to perform specific tasks, in hopes of eventually being able to engineer and develop innovations ranging from designer cells and tissue to novel diagnostic and therapeutic devices. The CCBM also hosts an integrated, interdisciplinary training program for graduate students that emphasizes physical and biological components and research and training experiences for undergraduate and high school students to enhance the recruitment of underrepresented groups into STEM research.
