Patty Guerra

Family is everything to Linda Chang.

Chang, a 30-year-old administrative officer with the UC Merced Police Department, was a quiet high school freshman when she joined the Leo Club, the youth branch of the Merced Breakfast Lions Club's community service organization.

The youngest of 10 children (including two sets of twins), Chang got involved with the Leos at Merced High School for a simple reason: She was following her older sisters' footsteps.

UC Merced researchers are taking part in a comprehensive, multi-agency effort aimed at efficiently measuring and mitigating methane emissions.

IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory are leading the effort, which earned a $20 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy in December.

Editor's Note: This feature is part of a series of stories commemorating Black History Month. For more stories highlighting Black Excellence at UC Merced, visit news.ucmerced.edu/news/black-history-month.

Students come to the Black Academic Success & Engagement office for any number of reasons: They need help with time management or academic coaching or accessing support programs.

Measurements and data collected from space can be used to better understand life on Earth.

Helping diplomats navigate new cultures, removing mircroplastics from stormwater and automating raisin processing: These are some of the projects awarded winning scores at UC Merced's fall Innovate to Grow event.

Innovate to Grow, or I2G as it's known on campus, is a twice-a-year showcase for UC Merced engineering and computer science students to demonstrate projects they have been developing.

Teams of students work to address challenges presented to them by clients, then present their results to judges who are experts from around California.

As water becomes an ever more precious and unpredictable resource, particularly in the Central Valley, finding ways to precisely irrigate crops is a valuable tool in the fight against climate change.

Climate shifts have triggered more frequent and more severe droughts that have reduced the amount of water available for farming in key agricultural regions. Current methods to check the water needs of crops are costly and inefficient, making it difficult to use precision irrigation techniques that can save water while maintaining or improving crop yield.

It took Lilly Uvalle a few tries to complete her education at UC Merced.

Uvalle started her collegiate career in the fall of 2010 after graduating from Buhach Colony High School in Atwater.

"I did two years, my freshman and sophomore years," she said. "Then I withdrew. I tried coming back once in 2013 and withdrew again. Then I tried coming back in 2017."

Family obligations, mental health concerns and feeling overwhelmed by what it would take to get back to school got in the way. Then, in 2022, something changed.

In 2010, former President Jimmy Carter made his way to a young University of California, Merced campus to accept the Spendlove Prize in social justice, diplomacy and tolerance and to speak to the National Parks Institute.

"This is an honor for me," the president said, according to news accounts of the event. "The fact is human rights should encompass all those things, the basic freedoms that we cherish because of our constitutional commitments and the right of people to live a decent life."

Innovate to Grow, or I2G as it’s known on campus, is a twice-a-year showcase for UC Merced engineering and computer science students demonstrating projects they have been developing.

Students compete on teams that are judged by experts from around California. People can see the fall showcase Dec. 19, when teams display the results of their work.

These capstone projects are the culmination of students’ undergraduate careers, but the impacts are far more than academic: Teams work together to tackle real-world problems brought to them by clients.

Here's a nifty use for AI: Turning photographs and other images into Cubist art.

A team of UC Merced researchers developed a project to do just that, using artificial intelligence to transform images into the style of art created by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque that reduces and fractures objects into geometric forms.

One of those researchers, Edric Chan, is still in high school.