This is part of a series of profiles of new UC Merced Bobcats enrolled for the fall 2025 semester.
Leslie Perez-Cruz will start at UC Merced with several accomplishments already under her belt - she took classes at Merced College while attending high school and is a certified nursing assistant, on her way to become an emergency room technician and ultimately attend medical school.
A simulation for a proposed air transport system among University of California campuses earned an award for a team of UC Merced students.
Last July, a glitch in a software upgrade by a cybersecurity company impacted 8.5 million computers, resulting in the cancellation of 2,800 flights and delays for 11,000 more.
On May 18, 1995, the University of California Board of Regents voted to select Merced as the site for its ninth undergraduate campus.
To get to that point, Merced had to beat out what started as a list of 85 potential sites drawn up in 1989, after regents announced the year before they wanted to explore opening as many as three new campuses.
Recently, more than 150 students at 10 high schools in Los Angeles, New York City and Washington, D.C. completed Climate Justice, a UC Merced course , through a unique partnership between the University of California and the National Education Equity Lab.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted many facets of life, including health care, schools and the work environment.
A new study by UC Merced researchers shows evidence that the pandemic also fueled an elevated number of wildfires in the United States that year.
How?
Electrical engineering and computer science Professor Pengfei Su has received a CAREER award for his research on cross-layer performance tuning to enhance deep learning model efficiency.
He is the 41st researcher from UC Merced to earn a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The first solar-over-canal project in California, which started with research at UC Merced, has begun producing electricity. Plans are now in the works to expand the technology to other areas.
A groundbreaking initiative led by faculty from seven top research universities aims to accelerate the deployment of solar arrays over California's extensive canal network.
A multimillion-dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health will fund research at UC Merced that could help cancer patients and others live longer, healthier lives.
The $3.5 million, five-year grant will fund bioengineering Professor Joel Spencer's lab, which is investigating the thymus, a key organ in the human immune system.
Family is everything to Linda Chang.
Chang, a 30-year-old administrative officer with the UC Merced Police Department, was a quiet high school freshman when she joined the Leo Club, the youth branch of the Merced Breakfast Lions Club's community service organization.
The youngest of 10 children (including two sets of twins), Chang got involved with the Leos at Merced High School for a simple reason: She was following her older sisters' footsteps.
