UC Merced Students Shine in EPICS Program

A bright idea to create a new lighting system gave one of UC Merced's Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) teams an edge during a recent competition.

Each semester, EPICS teams work with a local non-profit group to solve an engineering-related problem for the organization. The EPICS program gives students an opportunity to earn academic credit, gain real world engineering experience and develop a host of skills.

At the end of the semester, each team gives a 12-minute presentation about their project. During last week's presentations, first place was awarded to the team that designed and installed the Hybrid Solar Natural Daylight System for the California State Mining Mineral Museum in Mariposa. The team also received $1,000 to add to their budget for next semester's project.

Team Get S.E.T. earned second place and $500 for its work with the Merced County Office of Education for designing science curriculum for K-12 students. Coming in third was the Castle Science and Technology team, which designed and built an interactive nanotechnology exhibit for middle school students that will eventually be displayed in Atwater.

Heat Transfer ExpertSettles in at UC Merced

Professor Michael Modest is highly regarded for research that has enabled engineers and scientists to better understand radiative heat transfer in a number of applications, including combustion systems in the aerospace industry. His textbook on radiative heat transfer is widely used by engineering educators around the globe.

After 22 years at Pennsylvania State University, Modest decided to try something new. Since joining UC Merced’s School of Engineering last summer, Modest has been busy teaching, establishing his lab and continuing his research in thermal radiation. He’s also collaborating on projects at Edwards Air Force Base in Lancaster and at CFD Research Corporation, a company that creates engineering simulations and innovative designs for aerospace, defense, biomedical and life sciences, and energy and materials technologies.

Cancer Research Among Center's Projects

UC Merced graduate student Jane HyoJin Lee is looking at what happens to cells when they’re exposed to an electric field, part of an effort to create more treatments for diseases such as cancer.

Her research, in conjunction with a graduate student and a professor at University of Southern California, is sponsored by UC Merced’s Center for Computational Biology. The interdisciplinary center uses computer models to expand biological understanding and is an example of the university’s commitment to addressing some of society’s pressing problems.

Electricity causes cell membranes to open so they can better absorb chemicals, said Lee, who’s pursuing her Ph.D. in applied mathematics.

Lee, a research assistant for Assistant Professor Mayya Tokman, started on the project in the beginning of 2009. They run computer models and analyze the results to see how the technology can be used for the treatment of diseases.

UC Merced Graduate Student Snags Job at Stanford

Two years of coding a computer database paid off for graduate student Elijah Meeks when the finished project landed him a job at Stanford University.

Meeks paired his knowledge of history with a deep understanding of computer language to create "The Digital Gazetteer of the Song Dynasty," a database coauthored with Assistant Professor Ruth Mostern that chronicles changes to medieval China's political landscape. It also serves as a companion piece to Mostern's book "Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern: The Spatial Organization of the Song State (960-1276 CE)." The book will be published in fall 2010 by Harvard Asia Center.

The finished database helped to secure Meeks a job two months ago with Stanford University as a digital humanities specialist.

Mostern said Meeks' job speaks to his talents and the value of the database.

"I’m proud of this on so many levels," she said. "It is blazing a new path for academic conversation."

UC Center to Assess Education Initiatives

UC Merced will be among the seven University of California campuses studying the effectiveness of national, state and UC education initiatives.

“California often spends billions of dollars on educational programs with little or no mandate to evaluate the effects of that investment,” UC Merced psychological sciences Professor William Shadish said.

The University of California Educational Evaluation Center (UCEC) includes the Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, San Diego and Santa Barbara campuses. The multidisciplinary team pulls together experts in economics, psychology, education, psychometrics and evaluation methodology. Shadish serves as the campus director for UC Merced.

The center will use a $2.2 million grant for the next four-and-a-half years. The funding begins Jan. 1, and the center will become self-sustaining by 2014 by winning contracts to evaluate other programs.

The seven campus directors will meet in February in Santa Barbara to plan out their first projects. The center’s other plans include graduate student evaluation training, grant writing support and developing cutting-edge evaluation methods.

“UC can play a bigger role in educational evaluations at both the state and national level,” Shadish said. “UCEC will help make that happen.”

UC Merced Prepares Alumna For Rigors of Grad School

Alumna Jo-Anne Rodriguez is taking what she learned as a molecular and cellular biology major at UC Merced and applying it to her pharmaceutical sciences studies as a doctoral student at the University of Maryland in Baltimore.

At UC Merced, Rodriguez interned for professor Mike Colvin in the computational biology program. Now, she’s working with a computational chemist on a project that uses computer-aided drug design to look at how the antibiotic erythromycin interacts with a specific ribosome. She hopes to find a way to either prevent the mutation or to work around it, something she’s confident she can do thanks to the foundation laid for her at UC Merced.

“UC Merced has definitely prepared me for this program,” Rodriguez said. “I’m able to recognize a lot of the information presented to me in classes from my undergrad work at UC Merced.”

UC Merced Students Demonstrate Benefits of Natural Daylight System

As part of their entrepreneurship class project, a group of UC Merced students will demonstrate the Hybrid Solar Natural Daylight System – which illuminates daylight through a LED lighting system at a fraction of the cost of electricity. The event will take place at noon Friday, Dec. 4 at the California State Mineral and Mining Museum, 5005 Fairgrounds Road, Mariposa.

“Our research contains some of the most up-to-date technology in non-imaging optics,” said Kevin Rico, a senior management major who has been involved with the project since spring 2007.

This semester, UC Merced’s Service Learning Engineering and Service Learning Management and Innovation teams are taking natural daylighting one step further, trying to make the technology ready for mass consumption.

“Our hope is to put this technology into the public eye and give them a sense of potential applications,” said Yang Li, a senior who has served as cost-benefit analysis leader for the project. “We can show them how the technology works and impart the ancillary benefits of using sunlight as a light source.”