Brenda Ortiz

Center Engages Campus, Community with Africa and its Diaspora

February 27, 2025

Two female standing in front of a poster

This story is part of a series for Black History Month. Read more stories highlighting Black excellence at UC Merced. The brutal deaths of African Americans George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and others at the hands of police officers five years ago catalyzed for Black communities to unite globally and...

Cognitive science Professor Teenie Matlock

Matlock Receives International Cognitive Science Prize

Teenie Matlock, Cognitive and Information Sciences professor and the McClatchy Chair in Communications, has been awarded the fourth Jeffrey L. Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community...

Zatz Named 2022 AAAS Fellow

Special Assistant to the Chancellor and sociology Professor Marjorie Zatz has been elected to the 2022 class of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), adding to the list of...

Graduate Summer Bridge Program Recognized as a ‘Program to Watch’

Graduate Division’s Competitive Edge Summer Bridge program for incoming Ph.D. students was identified as a Program to Watch by Excelencia in Education, a national effort to identify evidence-...

Environmental Systems Student Earns Prestigious Ford Fellowship

Lillie Pennington has been awarded a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine for the 2022-2023 academic year. She is one of 38...

Nobile Named Pew Innovation Fund Investigator

UC Merced Professor Clarissa J. Nobile has been named a 2022 Innovation Fund investigator by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Nobile and University of Missouri Professor David G. Mendoza-Cózatl have...

A multi-disciplinary team from UC Merced, Michigan State University and Resilient Oceans will look at how climate change will impact ecosystems through a symbiotic lens.

UC Merced Lands $12.5M NSF Grant to Predict the Impact of Climate Change on Symbiotic Systems

UC Merced has received a $12.5 million grant funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop the Biology Integration Institute (BII): INSITE — the INstitute for Symbiotic...

Sociology Ph.D. student Jullanar Williams Chancellor’s Fellowship for Inclusive Excellence

Four Ph.D. Students Awarded Chancellor’s Fellowship for Inclusive Excellence

UC Merced has awarded its second cohort of Chancellor’s Fellowship for Inclusive Excellence to four incoming Ph.D. students from the schools of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, Natural...

Five Students Earn NSF Graduate Research Fellowships

Two UC Merced doctoral students and three undergraduate alumni have each earned a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF-GRFP). The fellowships are highly competitive, with...

Recent sociology Ph.D. alumnus Alejandro Zermeño is now an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Sociology Boasts 11 Tenure-Track Faculty Placements in Its Short History

Just seven years after it began offering graduate degrees, UC Merced’s Sociology Department has already begun shaping the future of the professoriate by placing 11 of its graduate alumni in...