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Researchers Seek to Understand Messy Proteins that are Critical to Cellular Function

October 27, 2020
Biophysical chemistry Professor Shahar Sukenik and the graduate students in his lab are trying to make sense out of what might seem to some to be chaos. They aim to better understand how a series of floppy, malleable proteins function — or malfunction — inside cells. The work has earned Sukenik a $...

Hard Shells and Electrosensory Gels: Lab Makes Surprising Discovery

October 19, 2020
Molecular biology Professor Chris Amemiya and his former graduate student Molly Phillips have made a discovery that upends traditional ideas about a structural polysaccharide called chitin that is found in some fish. Over the course of their studies, they collected evidence that chitin — which...

Professor Mike Thompson's Work in Science Expands the Space of Protein Geometries

September 3, 2020
Professor Mike Thompson is a co-author of a paper in Science that expands the space of protein geometries by computational design. Protein design typically selects a protein topology and then identifies the geometries (secondary-structure lengths and orientations) that give the most stable...

New Grant More than Doubles Campus Supercomputing Power

August 31, 2020
UC Merced is rapidly gaining a strong reputation for research and scientific computing across many disciplines and a major expansion of its computing infrastructure is about to cement the campus’ status as a research computing hub. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is supplying $700,000 and the...

The Isborn Group Machine Learns Optical Spectroscopy

August 18, 2020
The Isborn group's work published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters uses machine learning frameworks to dramatically accelerate the simulation of multidimensional optical spectra for solvated biologically important chromophores. Traditionally these simulations have been prohibitively...

New NSF Center Intersects Chemistry and Mechanics

August 3, 2020
Scientists know the whats and whys of using light, heat and electricity to direct chemical reactions toward an end goal. What’s less well understood are the effects mechanical force can have on chemistry. Thanks to a three-year, $1.8 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, a team of...

Professor Explores Green Lubricants for Mechanical Systems with NSF Grant

June 29, 2020
Mechanical systems, such as car engines and manufacturing equipment, use petroleum-based lubricants and solvents that are considered hazardous. After use, those compounds mostly end up in the earth. Environmentally friendly alternatives — room-temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) — that...

Physics Ph.D. Student Named Grad Slam Campus Champion

May 21, 2020
UC Merced’s Graduate Division wrapped up its annual Grad Slam competition this week, announcing Physics doctoral candidate Boe Mendewala as its campus champion. The judges awarded two runners-up, Shayna Bennett, a third-year Ph.D. student in Applied Mathematics, and Melinda Gonzales, a first-year...

Professor Anne Kelley Provides a Perspective on Second Order Nonlinear Spectroscopies

February 21, 2020
In a perspective in the Journal of Chemical Physics, Professor Anne Kelley describes how “surface” and “bulk” contributions to the sum frequency or the second harmonic signal should be distinguishable through their angular dependence in a scattering geometry. It also...

Researchers Aim to Solve the Unsolvable to Predict the Unseeable

November 18, 2019
A pair of UC Merced researchers are combining computational chemistry and machine learning principles to solve what seems to be an intractable problem at the heart of quantum mechanics: predicting the movement of electrons, also known as electron dynamics. Over the next three years with a $1.2...

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