Thursday 19 June 2025
Professor Matthew Zawadzki is with the Department of Psychological Sciences in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts. His research examines social psychological processes as applied to health. This is the first of a two-part discussion.
About 4.5 billion people around the globe do not have access to adequate sanitation, and what they do have — typically pit latrines and lagoons — are responsible for widespread illnesses and a portion of the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.
UC Merced Professor Rebecca Ryals and a group of colleagues have a solution that not only increases safety, sustainability and jobs, but reduces greenhouse gas emissions and waste-borne illnesses while producing an effective fertilizer for agriculture.
UC Merced professors are leading or participating in four technology projects designed to mitigate the COVID-19 crisis.
The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the Banatao Institute awarded seed grants to 25 interdisciplinary, multi-campus teams to address the pandemic.
More than 95 proposals were reviewed, including rapid-cycle ventilators; next-generation face masks; new algorithms for contact tracing and advance prediction; and a portable, point-of-care rapid-testing device the size of a credit card.
A UC Merced researcher and her lab have unlocked one of the mysteries that could lead to treatments — or even cures — for prion diseases in mammals.
Prion diseases are a family of rare, progressive neurodegenerative disorders that affect both humans — such as with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or fatal familial insomnia — and animals, such as mad-cow disease. These disorders are usually rapidly progressive and always fatal, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Smokers and former smokers are not only more susceptible to COVID-19, they are far more likely to see their conditions worsen over time and to require intensive respiratory assistance, according to a review released Thursday by the UC Merced Nicotine and Cannabis Policy Center (NCPC).
Furthermore, the health risks may be heightened for people exposed to secondhand smoke and secondhand vaping, it says.
