UC Merced Graduate Student Finds New Career in Military Research

As a chemistry teacher at Merced High School in 2004, Scott Seronello frequently told his students to keep working at their education and never give up their dreams. Then his students asked why he hadn’t done that himself.

So he applied to UC Merced to pursue his dream of earning a Ph.D., which he did in 2010. From there, Seronello’s path took an unexpected turn — toward military research in the U.S. Army.

Working with Professor Jinah Choi at UC Merced, Seronello studied the hepatitis C virus and its interactions with ethanol. Results from their work have been published in the journals PLOS One, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and Free Radical Biology and Medicine.

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Media contact:
Brenda Ortiz

Computer Scientist Earns NSF Award, Research Grant

Engineering Professor Ming-Hsuan Yang of the University of California, Merced, has been named a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award to further his work on improving visual tracking abilities in machines.

The award will provide Yang, a computer scientist, with research funding of $473,797 over five years. Yang’s research will focus on developing computer algorithms that can efficiently and effectively empower machines with object tracking, detection and recognition capabilities similar to human cognition, all with the use of only a single camera.

“Professor Yang’s innovative and groundbreaking research into visual tracking is certainly deserving of this honor from the National Science Foundation,” said Dan Hirleman, Dean of Engineering at UC Merced. “The award represents a clear recognition and validation of the importance of this work.”

While humans can effortlessly locate moving objects in different environments, visual tracking remains one of the most important and challenging problems in computer vision. Yang’s algorithms would help machines handle scenarios in which the objects they are designed to track drift, disappear and reappear, or are obscured by other objects.

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UC Merced Receives National CHEA Award

UC Merced has been awarded the 2012 Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) Award for Outstanding Institutional Practice in Student Learning Outcomes. The campus was selected for demonstrating its capacity to address the challenges of student learning outcomes while providing increasing accountability.

UC Merced is one of three institutions selected from 47 applications submitted nationwide.

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Media contact:
Brenda Ortiz

UC Merced Researchers Improve Luminescent Solar Concentrator Design

A team of researchers at the University of California, Merced, has redesigned luminescent solar concentrators to be more efficient at sending sunlight to solar cells.

The advancement could be an important breakthrough for solar energy harvesting, said UC Merced physics Professor Sayantani Ghosh, who led the project.

UC Merced researchers have improved the
efficiency of luminescent solar concentrators.

"We tweaked the traditional flat design for luminescent solar concentrators and made them into cylinders," Ghosh said. "The results of this architectural redesign surprised us, as it significantly improves their efficiency."

The main problem preventing luminescent concentrators from being used commercially is that they have high rates of self-absorption, Ghosh said, meaning they absorb a significant amount of the light they produce instead of transporting it to the solar cells.

The research team showed the problem can be addressed by changing the shape of the concentrator. They discovered a hollow cylindrical solar concentrator is a better design compared with a flat concentrator or a solid cylinder concentrator. The hollow cylinders absorb more sunlight while having lower self-absorption losses.

UC Merced and Fresno Unified Leverage Resources to Increase Rate of Valley Grads Going to College

UC Merced's Center for Educational Partnerships (CEP) has teamed up with the Fresno Unified School District to support an important mission — helping more high school students graduate and get accepted to college.

Through a unique partnership, full-time coordinators from the CEP will work with high school counseling teams at every Fresno Unified high school in an effort to increase college-going rates.

“We are committed to helping students achieve access to higher education and to become leaders in their communities,” UC Merced Chancellor Dorothy Leland said. “Preparing students for success in college is an extension of our mission to serve the region.”

Pairing high school counselors with CEP academic coordinators will enable the high schools to further develop activities to promote a college-going culture in the fourth-largest school district in California, which serves more than 73,000 students. The collaboration is intended to increase the number of low-income and first-generation students who complete high school and enroll in and complete a postsecondary education, with a goal of increasing the college-going rate in the Fresno Unified district from 22 to 40 percent.

“We are truly fortunate to have this level of UC presence on our high school campuses, the level of which we have not seen before,” FUSD Superintendent Michael E. Hanson said. “Our students stand to benefit greatly from this significant partnership.”

The partnership will enable CEP coordinators to guide students with academic, financial aid and college counseling, broadening the depth of services on-site counselors can provide. Coordinators will help students complete college admissions applications, sign up and prepare for college entrance exams and provide financial aid information. They will also assist reentry students who want to get back on track to pursue postsecondary education.

One expected benefit of the partnership is immersing UC Merced’s CEP coordinators in the same equity and access philosophy training that Fresno Unified has implemented for decades, ensuring that upon graduation, students will have the greatest number of opportunities available to them.

Another potential outcome is creating a pipeline for high school counselors.

“Studies show that high school is the ideal time to generate awareness and interest in career fields,” said Orquidea Largo, interim director for the CEP. “School counselors are among the top resources that students turn to when seeking advice about choosing their career, so it seems natural that providing more guidance support may ultimately lead to recruiting students into the counseling pipeline.”

The partnership with UC Merced bolsters Fresno Unified’s existing collaborations with California State University, Fresno, and Fresno Pacific University, which also exist to increase the number of students applying for and being admitted to college.

State, federal and private funding have made the partnership between UC Merced and Fresno Unified a reality.

The CEP was recently awarded $3.4 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Education, and $1.15 million will be directed to its Talent Search program with two Fresno Unified School District high schools — Fresno and Roosevelt. The five-year grants are expected to support about 1,500 students per year throughout the Valley.

Approximately 600 students are benefiting from the first four-year grant CEP received from the Department of Education in 2006 to launch the Talent Search program at Delhi, Le Grand, Orestimba, El Diamante, Strathmore and Corcoran high schools.

Media contact:
Brenda Ortiz

UC Merced Sees Nearly 10% Increase in Applications

UC Merced, continues to see growing interest from prospective students, as witnessed by a 9.9 percent rise in applications over the 2011 academic year.

UC Merced received 15,054 undergraduate applications for Fall 2012, up from 13,701 in Fall 2011. Freshman applicants totaled 12,838, which represents 11.3 percent more than last fall.

“An increase in applications points to the campus’ growing popularity,” said J. Michael Thompson, assistant vice chancellor for enrollment management. “It is a direct reflection of the strong value placed on a UC Merced education and the development of our academic programs, hands-on research opportunities and a growing array of student activities and amenities.”

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Media contact:
Brenda Ortiz

UC Merced Poli Sci Graduate Discipline to Debut in Fall

Professor Jessica L. Trounstine

Graduate students interested in studying at UC Merced will have one more discipline to pursue this fall.

The political science group will launch its doctoral degree track within the Social and Cognitive Sciences graduate emphasis in August. The deadline to apply as a graduate student at UC Merced is Jan. 15.

In keeping with UC Merced's commitment to approaching research questions in innovative ways, the political science faculty structured the track in a different way.

Political science Professor Jessica L. Trounstine said most political science programs have four subfields — American politics, comparative politics, international relations and political theory.

"We think that is an outmoded way of thinking about political science," Trounstine said. "We think there are more interesting intersections."

Political science graduate studies at UC Merced will have two subfields, Political Cognition and Behavior (CAB) and Political Institutions and Political Economy (PIPE).

The Cognition and Behavior subfield will analyze how people behave and think politically, Trounstine said. This track has natural synergies with the fields of psychology and cognitive science.

Grad Student at Home in the Mountains

Peter Kirchner may have been born in California’s San Fernando Valley, but his heart and mind have always been close to the mountains. Much of his life has been spent living in Mono County, where he worked at a wilderness scout camp at age 15.

In the mid-1990s, he was a training officer for the Mono County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue Team. So when Professor Roger Bales, director of UC Merced’s Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI), invited him to work with him on a project in 2006, Kirchner knew it was a chance of a lifetime.

“I had just completed my master’s, and I came here to help (Bales) build a prototype hydrologic observatory, with an understanding that I would eventually begin a Ph.D. program,” Kirchner said.

Now, Kirchner is well on his way to earning his doctorate in environmental systems. He’s part of SNRI’s Mountain Hydrology Research Group, which is studying the impacts of climate change on the hydrology of mountain ecosystems.

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Accclaimed Costume Designer Brings Expertise into UC Merced Classroom

Dunya Ramicova's costume designs have enchanted audiences for decades, but some of her biggest fans now sit in UC Merced classrooms.

Ramicova, the university's first arts professor and one of its founding faculty members, also is an acclaimed costume designer. Last year, she worked on four projects that included the Metropolitan Opera production of "Nixon in China" and the Santa Fe Opera's "Griselda."

But home base is UC Merced, where the Emmy-winning designer draws on a wealth of experience to teach students about art, fashion and the relationship between clothing and history, politics, culture and more.

"Our students are something special," Ramicova said. "It is such a privilege to teach them."

A native of the former Czechoslovakia, Ramicova immigrated to the U.S. in 1968 and studied at the Goodman School of Drama and the Yale School of Drama. She taught costume design at the Yale School of Drama, Harvard University, UC Santa Barbara and UCLA before moving to UC Merced in 2004.

Ramicova has developed an international reputation by designing costumes for about 150 productions, including theater, opera, ballet, dance, film and television in the United States and Europe.

One frequent collaborator is Peter Sellars, the director of "Nixon in China." The two worked on the original production in 1987 and others through the years before again joining together at the Met.

Ramicova said costumes for the opera — based on President Nixon's visit to China in the 1970s — are designed by history. She studied film and photographs to help capture the styles.