Jody Murray

UC Merced students are getting first-hand experience in providing mental health care to the most vulnerable and needful among us, thanks to a partnership between the university and Merced County.

Undergraduate psychology majors are serving as interns at the county’s Department of Behavioral Health and Recovery Services, which works with other agencies to offer a system of care for people living with mental illness or substance abuse disorders.

Among the UC Merced students’ impressive creations in the dimly lighted room — dioramas, poems, photo collages, paintings in bold colors — Derek Miller’s creation attracted attention.

Because it gurgled.

It was a tall box open on one side. Balanced on top was a miniature footbridge made of red Popsicle sticks. Through the open side you could see clear beads dangling from the lid. At the bottom of the box, water trickled noisily into a tray glowing in sky-blue light.

If Arden, the sprawling, wild forest in William Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” were in the United States instead of the Bard’s imagination, it would certainly be a national park.

Like Yosemite.

That is why this light comedy is an ideal fit for the annual UC Merced theater project that weaves modern issues of environmental stewardship into the 16th-century playwright’s words.

A UC Merced professor entered the bleak world of a fading, 64-year-old man in a Virginia state prison to illustrate the challenges of being elderly and incarcerated.

“Where’s My Coffee Cup?” is a half-hour documentary by media and performance studies Professor Yehuda Sharim. It premieres April 18 at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. Plans are underway to present the film worldwide, including a possible screening at UC Merced this fall.

Only 10 years after it began, the Ph.D. program in UC Merced’s Department of Sociology made an impressive debut in U.S. News & World Report’s latest rankings of graduate-level offerings.

The Sociology graduate program tied for No. 64 nationally, sharing the position with UC Riverside, Temple University, the University of Florida and Washington State University.

UC Merced's Nicotine and Cannabis Policy Center has embarked on an innovative partnership with university researchers who can track an entire community’s health and habits with samples of human sewage.

The project aims to determine trends and levels of nicotine use in San Joaquin Valley communities through chemicals in wastewater. Collecting hard data on smoking and vaping can aid NCPC’s mission to help local public health agencies, community organizations and tobacco-control researchers give informed responses to the problem.

Deborah Taffa, an Indigenous author and educator whose book about growing up in a mixed-race home and struggling with social acceptance was hailed as one the best memoirs of 2024, will make a special visit to Merced this month.

Educators from across California will gather at UC Merced for an up-close look at a curriculum that teaches schoolchildren about Hmong Americans — their history in Southeast Asia, their cultural traditions, and their journeys to the United States to escape war and deadly oppression.

LGBTQ2S+ individuals use tobacco and nicotine products at significantly higher rates than straight and cisgender people, research shows. Reasons can include stress and other health problems brought on by systemic and social prejudice, along with barriers to support for breaking the habit.

UC Merced and CalPride Valle Central have partnered with the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences and advocates from across the nation to develop a program to support efforts by LGBTQ2S+ people to quit smoking.