Chemistry and Biochemistry (CBC) Ph.D. candidate Abigail Gyamfi has earned the 2025 American Chemical Society Leader Scholars Award. The ACS Leader Scholars program recognizes outstanding undergraduate students, graduate students and early-career scientists.
The ARCS Foundation Northern California awarded five UC Merced graduate students with 2025-26 fellowships. ARCS advances science and technology in the United States by providing financial awards to exceptional graduate-level scholars in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.
In total, the ARCS Foundation Northern California has gifted more than $200,000 in fellowship support to UC Merced since 2022.
This year’s ARCS recipients:
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.
Physics Ph.D. candidate Arabi Seshappan added two prestigious fellowships to her curriculum vitae: the Chateaubriand Fellowship in Science, Technology, Engineering Mathematics & Biology-Health and the UC President's Pre-Professoriate Fellowship.
Chemistry and Biochemistry Ph.D. student Abigail Gyamfi was recognized by the California Section of the American Chemical Society Summer Experiences for the Economically Disadvantaged (SEED) Program and the Women Chemists Committee (WCC).
“This is the first time a graduate student has been recognized by the California Section of the ACS, so Abigail is pretty unique,” WCC Co-chair and Project SEED Coordinator Elaine Yamaguchi said.
On Aug. 12, 2005, less than one month before UC Merced opened its doors to undergraduate students, Tamela Adkins joined the campus’s Police Department as support services manager.
Intially, her role included managing records and evidence, overseeing the police dispatch center and hiring. She later added responsibility for the administrative unit and a federally required annual report of security policy and crime statistics..
Tears filled her eyes as she expressed what the past 20 years have meant to her.
This is part of a series of profiles of new UC Merced Bobcats enrolled for the fall 2025 semester.
Drake Ledford was an exemplary high school student, earning a 4.29 GPA. The Merced Union High School District (MUHSD) recognized him as one of its top scholars. He was also honored as valedictorian for his class and a California Scholarship Federation Sealbearer, the highest level of recognition for academic achievement, at his graduation in June.
When Nicolette Lecy began her graduate studies at UC Merced, life was anything but typical.
It was August 2020, in the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lecy’s classes were held remotely, and she had limited access to campus.
Another challenge that could have hindered Lecy’s academic goals — she became a mother during the Thanksgiving break of her first semester at UC Merced.
Two UC Merced graduate students and an alum from the School of Natural Sciences were recently awarded fellowships from the highly competitive National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.
This year, NSF awarded 1,000 GRFP fellowships compared to about 2,000 in previous years.
UC Merced has earned two 2025 Carnegie distinctions, the Student Access and Earnings Classification “Opportunity Colleges and Universities” and the Institutional Classification by the Carnegie Foundation and the American Council on Education.
“It speaks to the mission and values we uphold as a student-centered, academically rigorous research institution,” said Chancellor Juan Sánchez Muñoz.
