Faculty

Professor Abatzoglou is interested in the hows and whys of climate and weather, and also the so whats. His lab's work spans many topics - from addressing questions on climate variability, to understanding climate impacts on natural resources, to developing climate datasets and tools. 

• Biolubrication
• Mechanobiology
• Adhesion of biological, biologically inspired, and synthetic molecules

• Smarter solutions for text entry, error correction, and editing on various devices
• Mobile interaction, tangible user interfaces, child-computer interaction, usable security, and scientific data visualization.

• Ecosystem climate solutions
• Water resources
• Hydrology

• Nanomechanics
• Nanotribology
• Scanning Probe Microscopy
• Surface Science

• Surface Water Quality
• Lake and Reservoir Management
• Mercury Cycling in Aquatic Ecosystems
• Natural Treatment Systems

• collaborative consumption
• employee engagement and inclusion
• organization-sponsored sharing platforms
• service delivery and digital retailing
• team collaboration and workplace diversity

• Robotics
• Motion planning
• Cooperative multi-robot systems
• Urban search and rescue & service robotics
• High fidelity robot simulation
• Artificial intelligence

Professor Carreira-Perpiñán's basic research interests are in machine learning — the estimation of models and representations from data. Most recently, he has been working on topics in the intersection of optimization and machine learning, in particular in learning algorithms for deep neural nets and for nonlinear embeddings. Other topics of interest are dimensionality reduction/manifold learning, clustering, denoising and other unsupervised learning problems, and mean-shift algorithms. He often gets inspiration from problems in speech processing (e.g. articulatory inversion and model adaptation), computer vision (e.g. segmentation, articulated pose tracking, image registration), sensor networks, robotics (e.g. inverse kinematics) and other application areas. In the past, he has also worked on computational neuroscience, specifically on dimension reduction models of the maps of the visual cortex.

Professor Castro is interested in the capacity of attention under cognitive workload, particularly in the context of technology and multitasking. He focuses on the validity of reaction time and accuracy as measures of different aspects of workload, as well as quantifying the risk of adverse outcomes due to these workload metrics in driving. He employs advanced cognitive modeling techniques to examine the mechanisms of attentional capacity, multitasking, and performance.

Professor Cerpa's broad interests lie broadly in the computer networking and distributed systems areas. His recent focus has been systems research in wireless sensor networks, with emphasis in wireless radio channel measurement and modeling, link quality estimation, routing algorithms, topology control, and programming models. Professor Cerpa is also interested in Internet protocols and operating systems issues. In the past, he has been involved in active networking, mobile IP, and protocol design and verification research.

His research group develops and deploys sensor networks that address some of the grand challenges in science and engineering, mostly in the energy, health and instruments for scientific discovery domains. Some of his projects include developing instruments for solar radiation mapping, energy and occupancy monitoring in smart buildings and exercise physiology monitoring and modeling.

• Development of effective teaching strategies for undergraduate computer science courses
• Development of a security education program for undergraduate students

• Mechatronics Control systems
• Unmanned aircraft systems
• Cyber-physical systems
• Applied fractional calculus

Raymond Chiao is a professor jointly in the UC Merced schools of Natural Sciences and Engineering. Previously, he was a professor for 38 years at UC Berkeley, where he earned international acclaim (including the Willis E. Lamb Medal and the Einstein Prize for Laser Science) studying nonlinear and quantum optics. At UC Merced, is pursuing a new line of groundbreaking research on gravitational radiation.

Professor Chin's studies have focused on the application of polymer physics, microfabrication and engineering principles to biological systems. The application of the theory and tools from engineering in his work has initiated many innovative and productive research projects. These studies have brought us a better understanding of natural phenomena from the unique perspective of engineering. Professor Chin's current research plans include:

• Intracellular Ca2+ signaling in acute pancreatitis, cystic fibrosis, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
• Applications of microfabrication techniques to study microenvironment effects on stem cell differentiation
• Spontaneous polymer gel assembly in aqueous environment Intracellular and intercellular signaling in unicellular phytoplankton cells

• PEM fuel cell
• Heat exchanger
• Thermal management
• Two-phase heat transfer and fluid flow
• Loop heat pipe
• Porous material 
• Carbon fiber

• Heat transfer
• Fluid Mechanics
• Wildfires
• Data Science
• Science Communication

• Surface water/groundwater interactions
• Watershed hydrology
• Forest management/water interactions
• Natural tracers for water movement
• Stakeholder engagement
• K-12 environmental education

• Structural Biology
• Biophysics
• Biochemistry of macromolecules and macromolecular assemblies (emphasis on inflammation and cellular death)
• Protein Engineering
• NMR Spectroscopy

• Energy conversion systems
• Dynamic simulation and control of thermal systems
• Adaptive thermal networks
• Absorption chillers and heat pumps
• Vapor compression systems with alternate refrigerants
• Microchannel heat exchangers
• Artificial neural networks and genetic algorithm for optimization of thermal components

• Cyber physical systems
• The Internet of Things
• Networked Embedded Systems
• Wireless and Mobile Networking

• Engineering systems for agriculture 
• Automation and intelligent machines for production and postharvest of agricultural crops 
• Precision agriculture technology 
• Sensors for biotic and abiotic plant stress detection 
• Mechanical harvesting machines and robotic systems for fruit and nut trees

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of human death all over the world. My laboratory have been focused in understanding molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in the development of cardiac arrhythmias during an increase in the heart rate (tachycardia) and after a cardiac infarction (ischemia).

Controlling the development of this cardiac arrhythmias will dramatically improve the rate of survival after a cardiac episode.

• Bioelectricity
• Physiological engineering
• Molecular and cellular cardiology

• Life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology development
• Energy systems modeling Increasing geographic specificity in LCA
• Climate change mitigation strategies
• Renewable energy systems

• risk-based decision-making
• renewable energy (solar, wind and geothermal)
• bio-based fuels and water desalination
• carbon management and sequestration
• energy efficiency 
• and pollution prevention, multiphase flow and process control

• Mechanics in biology
• Biomechanics, Mechanobiology and signaling in Chlamydomonas cilia
• Phototaxis in algae
• Biofluids and Biothermodynamics
• Multicellular motility and mechanics
• Statistical physics of active systems
• Biophysic

• Computational dynamics, mechanics and controls, with applications primarily in micro-scale biological systems
• Continuum-dynamics- and multi-body-dynamics-based modeling, and inverse modeling, of DNA and proteins, and their interactions
• Constitutive law modeling of bio-filaments from their molecular dynamics simulations

• Contaminant transport in aquatic systems
• Soil and groundwater remediation
• Development and use of environmental sensors

Aquatic ecosystems under threat from competing pressures to meet societal needs for water and food security while sustaining biodiversity and other ecosystem services; expertise in geospatial analytics, hyperspectral and satellite remote sensing, and sensor networks in inland and coastal waters and wetlands

• Sensor Systems
• Wireless Networks
• Ubiquitous Computing
• Smart Healthcare

• Complex adaptive systems
• Critical resource geography
• Landscape values
• Participatory mapping
• Public lands and protected areas

• Computer Architecture and Systems Design
• Emerging Workloads Acceleration
• Smart Edge-base Systems Design
• Energy-efficient Data Center Design

• Geometric modeling
• Computer graphics
• Computer animation
• Autonomous agents
• Robotics Artificial intelligence

• Applied economics in mountainous and semi-arctic ecosystems
• Coupled natural and human systems
• Sustainable resource management
• Sense of place
• Food security and food sovereignty
• Biomass, bioenergy, and biochar

• Climate Change and Water Sustainability
• Climate Change and Hydrologic Extremes
• Watershed and Regional Scale Hydrologic Modeling
• Water Resources Sensitivity and Scenario Analysis
• Role of Vegetation Dynamics on Future Water Resources under Climate Change
• Agriculture and Forest Management Options for Climate Change Adaptation and Sustainability
• Application of Remote Sensing and LiDAR in Hydrologic Modeling and Natural Resources Evaluation and Management

Professor Kolden's research focuses on characterizing and understanding wildfire intersections with the human-environment system through geospatial, temporal, and mixed-methods approaches.

• Understanding trends of growth of renewable energy and research issues that need to be tackled to support continued improvements
• Identifying the latest research challenges as the solar industry is growing rapidly and addressing these through partnerships with companies
• Understanding performance of PV systems and how the performance of the system and the grid it feeds into can be improved
• Understanding and addressing reliability issues with PV systems

• Electrochemical energy conversion and storage (e.g., fuel cells and batteries)
• Next generation non-volatile memory (e.g., resistive switching memory)
• Electrochemical nano-patterning
• Nanoscale electrochemistry
• Nanoscale material interface and surface phenomena
• Scanning probe microscopy based observations

• Electron microscopy
• Nanomaterials for application in technology and the environment

• Biomedical imaging instrumentation and reconstruction algorithm development, focusing on preclinical imaging
• X-ray Luminescence Optical Tomography (XLOT)
• Simultaneous Fluorescence Optical Tomography (FOT) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET)
• Cerenkov Luminescence Imaging (CLI)/Tomography (CLT)

• High performance computing
• Fault tolerance/resilience in large-scale parallel and distributed systems
• Power-aware computing
• Performance modeling and optimization

Professor Lu's Functional Materials Laboratory conducts fundamental scientific investigation aiming for creating new transducer materials, capable of efficiently converting one type of energy (or force) into another. Through design, synthesis, fabrication and characterization of molecular- and nano- building blocks that are arranged in a spatially predefined manner, these new platforms could enable technological breakthroughs in fields spanning from life science to green energy to soft robotics. Current research projects are:

• Low-energy Driven Thermal Contraction Polymer System
• 3D Nanocarbon Monolith for Sustainable Energy
• Dynamic hydrogel for exerting spatiotemporal forces for Stem Cell Differentiation
   

• Parallel and Distributed Computing
• Systems for HPC, Big Data, AI, and others
• Virtualization and Cloud Computing
• High-Performance Communication and I/O
• Performance, Scalability, Fault tolerance, QoS, and others

• Mesoscale non-diffusive heat transfer
• Mesoscale mass and energy transport in energy systems
• Thermal management of electronics and energy systems
• Environment-friendly water desalination systems
   

• Service science
• Human-computer interaction
• Distributed cognition

Tribology: Friction, wear and lubrication

• Water and wastewater treatment, especially land-based treatment systems
• Hazardous waste site remediation

Entrepreneurship theory with elements of cognitive science and philosophy

Tissue engineering is a sub/cross discipline that focuses on the design, development and maintenance of tissue products that are used for repairing, improving or restoring tissue function. This field is still in its infancy, and many problems and challenges exist that have yet to be overcome before safe, high-quality engineered tissue products are available in the marketplace. Therefore, my research focuses on:

• Deriving and characterizing pure populations from stem cells in vitro
• Comparing the function of such cells with mature cells derived in vivo
• Using these cells towards regenerative medicine applications
• Tissue engineering and cell therapy approaches
• Cardiovascular cell lineage, but plan to expand into other cell systems long-term

• Large scale hydro-economic modeling for water management and policy analysis
• Water management for agricultural, environmental and urban uses
• Agricultural production adaptation to drought and climate change
• Sustainable agroecosystems for water and food security
• Water informatics, consumptive water use in agriculture using remote sensing
• Impact analysis using partial and general equilibrium models

• Radiative heat transfer
• Heat transfer in combustion
• Heat transfer in hypersonic plasma

• Biophysics
• Quantitative and synthetic biology
• Protein folding, evolution and design
• Protein engineering
• Optical spectroscopy
• Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy (NMR)
• Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM)
• Laser spectroscopy and ultrafast kinetics
• Single molecule fluorescence
• Statistical mechanics
• Computational chemistry and biology

• Food-Energy-Water Systems (FEWS)
• Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA)
• Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) in developing communities
• Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
• Integration of Anthropology and Engineering
• Science Policy

• Image processing
• Computer vision
• Pattern recognition
• Machine learning
• Content-based information retrieval
• Digital libraries, data mining and knowledge discovery in spatio-temporal, multimedia and scientific datasets

• Angiogenesis
• Mechanobiology
• Vascular biology
• Genome manipulation tools

• Computational materials science
• Complex oxide
• Energy materials
• Quantum materials

• Political ecology
• Climate change mitigation in tropical forests
• Climate finance
• Global environmental governance
• Indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge
• Common property resource management
• Climate justice
• Nature-based solutions 
• Climate communication, outreach and engagement
• Regional expertise: Mexico and the Amazon (Ecuador, Peru, Guyana)

Thermal and electrokinetic transport processes with applications in:

• Thermal management
• Energy storage
• Water purification
• Advanced manufacturing

• Cyber-Physical Systems
• Internet-of-Things
• Ubiquitous Computing
• Multimodal signal processing for IoT applications
• Vibration/acoustic signal processing

• Innovation
• Careers
• Complexity
• Models of science

Atmospheric aerosols

• Snow science
• Mountain hydrology
• Water resources
• Sensor networks
• Remote sensing
• Climate change

• Large scale data management
• Database systems design and implementation
• Data aggregation methods
• Approximation and randomized algorithms

• Distributed computing
• Cloud computing
• Security
• Networks

Professor Spencer seeks to to develop novel optical imaging and sensing systems for applications in tissue regeneration, transplantation, and cancer. 

Current Research Topics:

• investigating new ways to image the thymus in live mice with subcellular resolution
• developing faster oxygen sensing methods for in vivo applications
• applying whole tissue imaging methods for studying immune reconstitution
• developing imaging assays for regenerative medicine and other applications

• Programming Languages
• Static and Dynamic Program Analysis
• High-performance/Parallel Computing
• Software Engineering

Professor Subramaniam seeks to understand the fundamental physicochemical mechanisms that govern the assembly and function of biomembranes. His lab group combines experimental tools from soft matter physics, chemistry, and molecular biology to tackle cutting-edge challenges in biomembrane engineering and bottom-up synthetic biology.  

 Current Research Topics:

• developing methods for high throughput fabrication of semi-synthetic cells 
• developing cost effective vesicle-based therapeutics and diagnostics to improve public health

• Vibrations
• Noise Control
• Industrial Automation
• Sensors
• Actuators
• Bio-Mechanics
• Physical Rehabilitation

Using a wide range of analytical methods (infra-red spectroscopy, electron microsocpy, x-ray absorption spectroscopy and mass spectroscopy), Professor Traina's group studies:

• Chemical transformations of pollutants in soils, surface and ground water
• Linkages between chemical form or speciation of particular pollutants and their relative toxicities in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems
• Roles of geoparticle surfaces and bacteria in pollutant fate

Current projects include the study of:

• Contaminants at Department of Energy waste sites (Cr, Pu and U)
• Role of Fe(II) and HSe- in transformations of nitroaromatic pesticides in wetlands
• Fate of pharmaceuticals in the surface waters of National Parks

Professor Viers is a watershed scientist with expertise in resource management and environmental decision making. His areas of watershed science research include:

• Agroecology and Conservation Agriculture Planning and Implementation
• Climatic and Hydrological Change Vulnerability Assessment and Adaptation Strategies
• Ecosystem Service and Biodiversity Inventory, Assessment, and Restoration
• Geospatial Technologies (Geographic Information Systems / Remote Sensing);
• Informatics; Database Design and Data Mining
• Water and Watershed Management; Water Footprinting

• Biomolecular materials (design of materials synthesis, assembly, processing and physical optimization strategies based on examples from nature)
• Physical science and engineering of polymers and liquid crystals (structure-property-processing relationships)

• 3D printable functional polymers
• Biomimetic electronic materials
• Organic structural metamaterials
• Wearable and implantable (bio)electronics

Graduate Group:

Biological Engineering and Small-Scale Technologies (BEST)

• Applied climatology
• Climate-ecosystem-wildfire interactions
• Statistical modeling for seasonal forecasts, paleofire reconstructions and climate-change impact assessments
• Resource management and policy

Director, UC Solar

• Solar power and renewable energy
• Elementary particle physics
• Non-imaging optics

• Computer vision
• Pattern recognition
• Machine learning

• Pedagogic research
• Forensic engineering education and dissemination
• Recruitment, Retention and graduation of first generation and economically disadvantaged students
• Advanced materials to improve sustainability and resilience of civil engineering constructed facilities
• Structural health monitoring
• Computational and analytical models to predict mechanical behavior of adaptive and advanced materials
• Structural component and system-level testing

• Economics of information systems
• Security and privacy
• Knowledge management
• Decision support
• Behavioral operations