Student Demand for UC Merced Reaches New Heights

Next fall’s freshman class at the University of California, Merced, will be the largest ever at the newest UC campus — up 6 percent from the fall of 2010, based on data released today by the university’s Office of Admissions.

The campus said it has received a Statement of Intent to Register (SIR) from 1,829 freshmen admitted for Fall 2011 classes. That compares with 1,725 SIRs at this time last year.

While the actual number of new students will not be known exactly until fall registration is completed, the surge in freshman enrollees is expected to push UC Merced’s total enrollment past the 5,000-student mark for the first time.

“This is an exciting time for UC Merced as we welcome the Class of 2015 and surpass the 5,000 enrollment mark,” said Jane Lawrence, vice chancellor for student affairs. “Both the academic qualifications and the diversity of the class of applicants accepted by UC Merced are at record high levels.”

To view UC systemwide SIR data, visit http://www.ucop.edu/news/studstaff.html.

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Media Contact: Brenda Ortiz, 209-228-4203

Engineers for a Sustainable World Moves to UC Merced

Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW) — a fast-growing, global nonprofit network of about 4,000 students, faculty and professionals dedicated to building a sustainable world for current and future generations by way of collaborative, interdisciplinary engineering projects — is moving its headquarters to UC Merced, effective July 1.

ESW, like UC Merced itself, is committed to finding sustainable solutions to society’s most challenging problems, from developed countries creating millions of tons of pollution and waste each year to people around the world struggling to gain access to clean water, healthy food and suitable shelter.

“The vision for Engineers for a Sustainable World is improving the quality of life and the prosperity of the planet, but in a way that’s economically, environmentally and socially sustainable,” said E. Daniel Hirleman, dean of UC Merced’s School of Engineering and chair of the ESW advisory board. “UC Merced has sustainability in its DNA, so I think it’s an obvious home for a group like Engineers for a Sustainable World.”

ESW’s move to UC Merced is yet another example of the campus’ commitment to sustainability. The campus itself is a living laboratory, with many research projects that take advantage of its own sustainable practices in design and operations. And UC Merced is the first campus in the nation to have all of its buildings certified silver or better by the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program.

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UC Merced Study Shows Urban Rail Reduces Air Pollution

The opening of a major urban rail system in Taiwan caused a reduction in air pollution, according to a forthcoming study by UC Merced professors.

"Despite the importance of the transportation sector for air pollution, little work has examined the air pollution effects of transportation infrastructure directly," Professor Alexander Whalley and Professor Yihsu Chen wrote in the paper. "This paper seeks to fill the gap by examining the effects of one major type of transportation infrastructure — urban rail transit — on air quality."

Researchers have disagreed about whether investment in urban rail infrastructure would improve air quality by taking cars off the road or harm it by encouraging more travel. The UC Merced study, "Green Infrastructure: The Effects of Urban Rail Transit on Air Quality," helps to answer that question. It has been accepted for publication in the "American Economic Journal: Economic Policy."

Whalley is an economist in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts (SSHA). Chen is an environmental and energy economics professor with a dual appointment in SSHA and in the School of Engineering. The research is an example of UC Merced faculty members taking an interdisciplinary approach to creating new knowledge.

The Taipei Metro opened in 1996 as a new urban rail transit system, the culmination of an effort to improve the city's transportation and air quality. From the 1970s to the 1990s, Taipei had some of the worst air among the world's largest cities, with a significant amount coming from automobiles.

Whalley and Chen used hourly air quality data from Taiwan to quantify how the new rail transit system impacted the air quality. The UC Merced researchers found that the system's opening caused a meaningful reduction of carbon monoxide, between 5 and 15 percent. They also found some evidence that there was a reduction in the nitrogen oxides in the air. The public health impacts implied in the findings are an important beneficial aspect of mass transit infrastructure often not taken into account by policy makers, according to the study.

First UC Merced Alum Receives Juris Doctorate

Ann Hinesley-Perez wasn’t thinking about making history when she enrolled three years ago at the San Joaquin College of Law. But she’s doing that as the first-ever UC Merced alum to earn a Juris Doctorate from the Fresno-area law school.

Hinesley-Perez, who was born and raised in Merced, left town in 2003 to pursue a degree in psychology at UC Berkeley. She didn’t have the option of staying home because UC Merced was still in development.
But after the new campus opened in 2005, she returned to her roots — and her career goals also began to shift.

Hinesley-Perez arranged to job-shadow an attorney at the Merced law firm of Morse, Morse & Morse. She took a job there as a legal assistant and found that she enjoyed the field, prompting a change in her career path.
The job “definitely influenced my decision” to go to law school, she said. “It gave me the push I needed.”

In 2008, Hinesley-Perez graduated from UC Merced with a psychology degree and began law school. She said psychology and the law are related.

“To effectively practice, you have to understand a lot about psychology,” Hinesley-Perez said. “It was an easy transition.”

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Impact: Marine Biodiversity on Display

UC Merced marine biologist Michael Dawson studies jellyfish, unique animals found in both fresh and salt water locations. Some of that research is currently on display in an exhibit on the third floor of the Kolligian Library.

“Jellyfish are one of the oldest groups of organisms that exist on the planet, so they’ve been an important component of ecosystems for a long, long time,” Dawson said. “I think we’re really interested in how the diversity of life evolved and how it all fits together.”

The exhibit focuses on marine biodiversity, and Dawson’s research is uncovering important new information about jellyfish populations.

“We found jellies that have just been known to have a distribution in the western Pacific and Indonesia, and now we found them in the eastern Pacific around El Salvador, Oaxaca and the Gulf of California,” said Liza Gomez Daglio, a graduate student in Dawson’s lab. “So this is really really surprising.”

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Social Smokers Less Likely to Try to Quit

If you're a social smoker, you probably haven't given much thought to quitting or tried for more than a month.

That is one of the many findings from a national study in the American Journal of Public Health conducted by professors at the University of California, Merced, and UC San Francisco.

In the study, "Social Smoking Among Young Adults: Investigation of Intentions and Attempts to Quit," the researchers compared the cessation efforts of three different definitions of social smokers. The researchers found that how young adults define their smoking plays a role in whether they try to quit and how successful they are at quitting.

"The self-identified social smokers may pose a particular challenge for cessation," UC Merced psychology Professor Anna V. Song and UCSF Professor Pamela M. Ling wrote in the paper. "These 'social smokers' may not regard themselves as 'real smokers.' The 'social smoker' label may represent an effort to deny or discount the risks associated with smoking."

While the health consequences of social smoking have not been specifically studied, the professors said light smoking (fewer than 10 cigarettes per day) is associated with increased cardiovascular risk and an increased risk of cancer, respiratory tract infections, cataracts, impaired fertility and fractures.

Song and Ling looked at people who identify themselves as social smokers but smoke outside of social situations or smoke alone, as well as those who limit their smoking to either smoking mainly or entirely with other people.

Juan C. Meza Named Dean of Natural Sciences

UC Merced today announced the appointment of Juan C. Meza as the new dean of its School of Natural Sciences. He will join UC Merced in the fall.

Meza will take over for Mike Colvin, who has served as interim dean since February. Colvin replaced founding Dean Maria Pallavicini, who resigned to become provost at the University of the Pacific.

Meza studied at Rice University — earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in computational and applied mathematics — and currently works at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) as head of the High Performance Computing Research Department and acting director of the Computational Research Division, where he manages a staff of 272 employees and a $50 million budget.

At LBNL, Meza helped grow research funding levels and established collaborations with the lab’s earth sciences, environmental energy technologies, physics and genomics divisions.

Meza, named one of Hispanic Business magazine’s “Top 100 Influentials of 2009” and one of the “Top 200 Most Influential Hispanics in Technology” by Hispanic Engineer and Information Technology magazine in April, is the son of Mexican immigrants and a first-generation college student.

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