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2024-2025 Physics Graduate Student News and Achievements

September 19, 2025
Welcome to our 15 first-year students! Name Fall Rotation Previous University Shrouk Abdulshafy Wilson University of Padova, Italy Daniel Bartolome...

Cal-Bridge Scholar Rolando Ortega Wants to Build the Future

September 4, 2025
This is part of a series of profiles of new UC Merced Bobcats enrolled for the fall 2025 semester.  Rolando Ortega is closing in on his dream of earning a Ph.D. This fall, the Cal-Bridge scholar from Los Angeles County joins UC Merced to start his doctoral journey. With experience...

Scientists Discover Way to Pause Ultrafast Melting in Silicon Using Precisely Timed Laser Pulses

August 7, 2025
A team of physicists has discovered a method to temporarily halt the ultrafast melting of silicon using a carefully timed sequence of laser pulses. This finding opens new possibilities for controlling material behavior under extreme conditions and could improve the accuracy of experiments that...

NSF Award Supports Young Faculty Member’s Research into Building Blocks of the Universe

May 1, 2025
Cosmology Professor Anna Nierenberg has received a CAREER award for a project that will vastly improve the study of the nature of dark matter in the universe. She is the 42nd researcher from UC Merced to earn a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). CAREER awards are among the...

Graduate Student Earns Fellowship to Study Fusion at Livermore Lab

April 16, 2025
UC Merced physics graduate student Sameen Yunus has been awarded a prestigious fellowship allowing her to spend the next three years working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, conducting experiments and simulations that could lead to faster fusion ignition. The UC-National Lab In-Residence...

Wilson Among This Year’s AAAS Fellows, Recognized for Science and Outreach

March 27, 2025
Vice Chancellor for Research, Innovation and Economic Development Gillian Wilson has been named a 2024 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals. Being elected an AAAS...

Stargazing and Lecture Offer Unique Perspectives on Stars and Exoplanets

February 27, 2025
The night sky is filled with countless mysteries and worlds yet to be explored but that someday might be visited by spacecraft. In a free event titled “Celestial Tales: Stars, Exoplanets and the Myths That Connect Us,” on March 6, the campus community and the public will hear from Professor Yosuke...

Founding Faculty Roland Winston Remembered for Pioneering Solar Energy

February 18, 2025
Distinguished Professor Emeritus Roland Winston, a pioneer in solar energy, engineering and physics, died Feb. 8 at the age of 88 at his home in Merced. A founding faculty member in the schools of Natural Sciences and Engineering at UC Merced, Winston also founded and directed the intercampus...

UC Awards Support Tackling Big Questions in Health, Physics, Agriculture and Climate

February 5, 2025
Faculty members at UC Merced are taking the lead on four Multicampus Research Program Initiatives (MRPI), working with colleagues around the University of California system to address challenges around labor and agriculture, active matter, Indigenous health and fusion energy. “The MRPI program...

From Roots and Resilience: Md Mehdi Masud

January 13, 2025
Born in Bangladesh, Md Mehdi Masud's story is one of determination and intellectual curiosity. Despite the limited research resources in his home country, he transformed these challenges into steppingstones for success. "My upbringing instilled a deep sense of perseverance and...