When Isabelle Haddad, a Ph.D. candidate in Environmental Systems, looks ahead to the next chapter, her future is already coming into focus.
The New York native participated in commencement in May and will defend her dissertation in August. She will then begin a one-year, full-time position on Aug. 31 as a Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Transportation Affordability and Equity Fellow.
Editor's note: This story is republished from the Spring/Summer 2026 issue of UC Merced Magazine.
Omar DeGuchy remembers the moment he left the comfort of UC Merced — the place he’d found his footing — and stepped onto what some call “the smartest square mile on Earth.” He defended his Ph.D. dissertation in applied mathematics remotely in 2020 and started a job at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
Simone Samra’s dedication to education and community work is influenced by her mother's experience immigrating from India and her belief in the power of education for immigrant women.
Samra is keenly aware of the barriers immigrants face when attempting to transfer their education or degrees, often limiting their career options.
“If you don't get the opportunity to use your education in America, it can be very discouraging,” said Samra, who graduated from John H. Pitman High School in Turlock.
Nervous but prepared, Tahirah Williams took the stage at UC Merced’s Grad Slam competition in March and delivered her three-minute talk, “More Than Slime: When Mucus Meets the Valley Fever Invader.” By day’s end, she had been announced as the university’s 12th Grad Slam Campus Champion.
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.
