On March 20, UC Merced's Center for Health Equity brought together researchers, regional health partners and community members to share findings from a study on how community health workers are transforming patient care across the San Joaquin Valley.
As a child of the Central Valley and a member of a Native tribe, Grace Grinder developed an early awareness of health care disparities affecting rural regions and underserved communities.
While in third grade, Grinder lost her grandmother to what she described as too few physicians nearby to provide timely, quality care. That loss planted a seed.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. A few more taps and Nayelyi Salazar would be a community college student — a big step for the high-schooler from Delhi, a town of 10,000 that hugs California’s Highway 99.
She hesitated. Days earlier, she received an acceptance letter from a University of California campus. Awesome news, but she couldn’t shake doubts about being UC-worthy. What to do? She leaned back from the laptop. It was a Friday. She would take the weekend to think it over.
Should she go straight to UC Merced?
Our circadian clocks play a crucial role in our health and well-being, keeping our 24-hour biological cycles in sync with light and dark exposure. Disruptions in the rhythms of these clocks, as with jet lag and daylight saving time, can throw our daily rhythms out of whack.
But a group of researchers is getting closer to understanding how these clocks operate.
UC Merced biochemistry Professor Andy LiWang and his colleagues have solved how the circadian clocks in microscopic bacteria precisely control when different genes are turned on and off during the 24-hour cycle.
Biochemistry Professor Andy LiWang has spent much of his career studying how life keeps time. His work on the circadian clock of cyanobacteria — tiny, ancient organisms that share the planet with us — has shed light on one of biology’s most elegant systems.
But his newest research project, supported by a prestigious $1.2 million grant from the William M. Keck Foundation, pushes that inquiry into bold, uncharted territory.
Public health Ph.D. student Felix Agyemang Opoku has been awarded the UC Global Health Initiative Center for Planetary Health Water and Health Summer Research Fellowship.
The research fellowships are designed to provide students with funding to conduct research on water and health.
Opoku, who works with Professor Asa Bradman, is one of three selected for the fellowship across all UC campuses.
