Merced's Mission

Peggy A. O'Day wouldn't call herself strictly a chemist, although much of her environmental heavy-element research is rooted in chemistry. During her nine years as a professor at Arizona State University, she wore many hats and split academic appointments in geology, as well as chemistry and biochemistry.

Now she's a professor of natural sciences at the University of California's newest campus, Merced, and she doesn't have to straddle departments anymore. That's because UC's 10th campus, which opens to its first undergraduate class on Sept. 5, has no departments.

Partly because it aims to help lead the interdisciplinary movement and partly because it's simply not big enough for departmental specialization, UC Merced asks its faculty only for allegiance to one of three schools: Social Science, Humanities & Arts; Natural Sciences; or Engineering. This unusual no-department structure--employed by a few universities such as California Institute of Technology and Rockefeller University--has been a big attraction for new faculty, many of whom arrived with an interdisciplinary bent.

Right now, chemists, biologists, physicists, and engineers mix things up in the temporary digs they have been sharing at the nearby site of the former Castle Air Force Base. They'll still be together when they move into UC Merced's soon-to-be completed science building, where faculty with similar projects, even if they're from different disciplines, will be clustered in groups.

"I interface with colleagues whom I'd normally never even meet at another university," says Matthew Meyer, an assistant professor of natural sciences who studies drug discovery methods.

Merced has other charms for the prospective academic, including relatively inexpensive--for a college town in California--real estate. The snowpack, water, and air of Yosemite National Forest, only 80 miles away from the San Joaquin Valley campus, are environmental barometers rich in research potential. Many new professors here spent at least part of their educations at a UC campus, and they've nursed a desire to come back to California.

But the real draw, say more than a dozen science and engineering academics and administrators, has been the opportunity to participate in the genesis of a research institution with the prestige of the University of California.

"My colleagues [said], 'You're crazy, there's nothing there,' " says Maria G. Pallavicini, dean of the natural sciences school, who left a professorship in the laboratory medicine and radiation oncology departments at UC San Francisco. "But I thought, I could stay at UCSF and continue to publish and run a research lab, or I could say I helped start a new research university."

The 55 faculty now at Merced have all had a hand in selecting the university's opening major programs and in planning how the university will grow. The first science and engineering majors, including environmental engineering, biological sciences, earth systems science, and human biology, reflect issues facing California's central valley: air and water quality, energy, agriculture, and human health. More fundamental scientific disciplines, such as math, physics, and chemistry, as well as chemical engineering, are soon to follow suit.

MAKEOVER

Merced Joins UC's Other Two Rural Campuses

It may have been 40 years since the last University of California campus was built, but the picture is the same. David B. Ashley, provost and executive vice chancellor for UC Merced, recalls watching a 1965 documentary on the construction of UC Irvine. "It looks identical to what we're doing here," he says.

UC Merced isn't the first University of California campus to settle in a rural area, either. UC Davis, north of the San Francisco Bay Area, and UC Riverside, east of Los Angeles, both struggled in the shadows of their more cosmopolitan cousins, UC Berkeley and UC Los Angeles. In the agriculture-rich San Joaquin Valley of California, where higher education hasn't been a focus, UC Merced may face some of the same issues.

Anne Myers Kelley, a natural sciences professor and spectroscopic chemist at UC Merced, did her undergraduate work at UC Riverside in the 1970s. Back then, she says, the university's future was up in the air because they weren't drawing enough students.

During the past 10 years, however, under the leadership of physicist and Chancellor Raymond Orbach--who is now director of the Office of Science at the Department of Energy--Riverside nearly doubled its enrollment, from 8,800 to 14,400 students. The university has also lured a number of high-profile chemistry faculty.

In the 1950s and '60s, UC Davis was seeking respect for its "cow town" reputation. A 1963 article in Time magazine touted it as the "MIT of California agriculture." Now, it's a world-class research institution, with high-powered health sciences, veterinary, and physics departments. Yet Davis still manages to preserve its homey, rural feel.

That's a quality many hope will eventually permeate Merced. Patti Waid Istas, UC Merced's director of communications, lived in Davis and liked its blend of small-town and college atmosphere. "I jumped at the chance to come to Merced," she says.

MOST UNIVERSITIES have a long-standing history of traditional major programs, such as chemistry, physics, and math. As science evolves to include more facets--for example, materials or bioinformatics--universities simply create new majors, which end up proliferating. At UC Merced, however, interdisciplinarity is built in. A core set of required classes gives students a broad background, and then they select an emphasis, such as environmental hydrology (in environmental engineering) or bioinformatics and computational biology (in biological sciences).

"We're trying to be a little more systematic from the start, thinking about how to balance depth and breadth to create a major that's addressing [what] the modern science students need to learn," O'Day says.

Natural sciences professor Anne Myers Kelley, a spectroscopic chemist who came to Merced from Kansas State University two years ago with her husband, David F. Kelley, also a chemist and a professor at Merced, is spearheading the establishment of Merced's chemistry major, which will be ACS accredited. In fact, Merced's first freshman chemistry majors start in the fall of 2006, and junior transfer students begin in fall of 2007. In addition to a "generic" chemistry major, emphases in modern environmental, materials, or biological chemistry will mesh with Merced's already-blossoming focuses in these areas.

"Starting a brand-new research university is not something that happens very often," Anne Kelley says. "I look at everything and say, 'It could work.' "

The school's biology program is off to a roaring start, says Michael E. Colvin, a natural sciences professor. Colvin, who began his career as a chemist and is now a computational biologist, came to Merced from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. With guidance from a National Academy of Sciences report about what biologists need to know in 2010, the program is requiring more math and computer skills from biology students than is traditional. "I was a little worried this [requirement] would scare people," he says. But one-third of incoming freshmen are majoring in human biology, making it the most popular major.

Graduate students, some of whom followed new faculty from their old institutions, were first admitted last year. The graduate programs, modeled after a program at UC Davis, are structured into groups--such as quantitative and systems biology, environmental systems, and atomic and molecular science and engineering--that reside administratively outside the colleges.

A long and sometimes tortured 17 years in the making, the $380 million UC Merced is the first UC campus to be built in 40 years. (The most recent campuses, UC Santa Cruz and UC Irvine, were built in 1965.) UC Merced is also one of the few public American research universities to be created from the ground up in past decades. While construction crews finish the new campus's classroom and office building, 1,000 students will attend their first lectures in the newly completed library building.

Just two years ago, the Merced campus site was an old golf course. Now, the library, classroom, and science buildings overlook hip, apartment-like dorms ready to house 500 students. The harsh climate is tamed with an energy-conscious design: The university's water supply is stored in a landmark silver, silolike cylinder, a 2 million-gal water tank that's chilled during the night when the cost is lower. Strategically placed trees and breezes from nearby Yosemite Lake shade and cool the area.

The University of California knew long ago that California's expanding student population--projected to increase by 60,000 in the next 10 years--would eventually burst the seams of its existing campuses. Ten years ago, the UC regents settled on Merced, a central valley town with a population of about 70,000. Agriculture is the predominant industry, and most who live in the area don't go to college. UC Merced's goal is also to draw in a greater percentage of underrepresented minorities, including Latino, African American, and American Indian students.

The tract of land originally set aside for the campus turned out to harbor a collection of wetland vernal pools that were home to an endangered species of fairy shrimp, which at one point was bandied about as a possible mascot. But the David & Lucile Packard Foundation plunked down $11 million so that the University of California could move the campus site to a less environmentally sensitive area; California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pledged budgetary support for the campus two years ago.

Before the university came along, Merced the town had been known primarily for Castle Air Force Base, located 10 miles north in the adjacent burg of Atwater. When the base closed in 1995, the already economically depressed area sunk even further. Many residents are looking to the university to transform Merced into a college town, not unlike the once-sleepy agricultural town of Davis, north of the Bay Area. Merced's picturesque downtown area, with large trees and older houses, contrasts dramatically with areas of new growth lined with chain stores and restaurants such as Borders, Lowe's, and Applebee's. "The standard measure of civilization is the number of Starbucks per capita, and that's increased dramatically," David Kelley quips.

One-third of UC Merced students are coming from the central valley, although that's short of the university's goal of 50%. The student population is 25% Latino, a figure on par with that at UC Riverside. Growing at a rate of 800 students per year, the campus is slated to accommodate 25,000 students and 600 faculty members in 30 years. A second science building is already in the works, as are plans for a medical school.

Still, the new UC campus will take some time to attract students, particularly those transferring from junior colleges. "We dramatically overestimated the number of transfer students," says Jeff R. Wright, dean of the College of Engineering. That's left the university scrambling to provide extra lower division undergraduate classes and redoubling efforts to get the word out to students at community colleges that a research university education is a viable option.

And some Merced residents still are wary of the university's presence in the town and the unchecked growth it might cause. In some cases, their fears have been realized: Housing prices have doubled in the past two years, and the median home price now is more than $300,000.

MEANWHILE, work continues apace at the Castle buildings, some of which were transformed into state-of-the-art research and student labs. With a long lease, many of those lab facilities will remain for years. Faculty and staff, many who have been part of UC Merced for two or three years, work overtime, building up their own numbers by hiring new professors while preparing to launch their academic programs.

It's been a wild ride, says Keith E. Alley, dean of graduate studies and vice chancellor of research in the School of Natural Sciences. He moves through the hallways and labs, greeting colleagues, stopping to banter with postdoc Joanna Mroczkowska as she studies stem cells with a fluorescence microscope, and chatting with Samantha N. Torres, a physiology undergraduate student at the University of New Mexico who is spending the summer at Merced working with assistant natural sciences professor Rudy M. Ortiz.

"It's a great opportunity to see something start from the ground up," says Torres as she monitors assays of proteins that inhibit inflammation. She's there on a fellowship with the National Science Foundation Alliances for Graduate Education & the Professoriate, a program to increase underrepresented minorities in science and engineering.

Though the atmosphere is cozy, it's getting harder to know everyone, Alley says. In the past few years, UC Merced doubled its faculty, and hiring will continue at a rate of several dozen per year for years to come.

A great deal of time is spent on hiring; all the current professors are on numerous search committees. Merced has attracted 13,000 applicants for 60 positions. The ratio of applicants to positions is consistent with that for most UC faculty openings, but the sheer numbers are daunting.

UC MERCED Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor David B. Ashley says faculty are chosen with the same strict standards of any other UC campus. In fact, if the UC Merced project had fallen through, as some thought it might during California's recent budget crisis, all the faculty would have been guaranteed positions somewhere within the UC system.

The university is also putting in place organizations such as the UC Merced Energy Institute, headed by Roland Winston, who has joint appointments in the Natural Sciences and Engineering Schools. Winston, who was at the University of Chicago for 39 years, is considered the world's premier expert on renewable energy.

Natural sciences professor Samuel J. Traina, who grew up in the central valley, heads the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, a collection of researchers who study how the central valley and bordering Sierra Nevada range interact. "The obvious connection is air," Traina says, along with water and climate. The area brings with it a lot of long-standing environmental problems, such as legacy mining and pollution generated by the high levels of agriculture.

FAMILY MATTERS

Solving The 'Two-Body Problem' At UC Merced

Professorships are so rare and coveted that married academics who want to find jobs in the same place face the famous "two-body problem."

With the University of California, Merced, hiring at a furious pace, a number of faculty have been able to arrive as a unit, both with academic appointments.

Anne Myers Kelley and David Kelley were chemistry professors on opposite sides of the country when they met--she was at the University of Rochester, and he was at Colorado State University. They spent a good part of their first year of marriage commuting to see each other every two weeks. "That wasn't going to work," Anne Kelley says. The pair found professorships together in the chemistry department at Kansas State University.

But they wanted to move away from the Midwest, so they started looking for other opportunities. "When we discovered the opening at UC Merced, we jumped on it," she says.

Another couple drawn to UC Merced consists of engineering professors Martha Conklin and Roger C. Bales. Both had been at the University of Arizona, in the hydrology and water resources department, for 16 years. Bales had done graduate work at UC Berkeley, and the couple wanted to join the UC system. They got offers from both Merced and another UC campus. "We chose Merced in good part because of its proximity to the Sierras," Conklin says. "They're a wonderful example of an understudied, important water source."

IN THE MOUNTAINS, water drains off both the east and west sides, providing water to almost 10% of the U.S. "It's an important water source that could be extremely vulnerable if the climate changes," says Martha H. Conklin, an engineering professor who studies chemical processes in snow. For a long time, it was difficult to do research at Yosemite because access was restricted. Now, the park is granting access and research permits. "It's an excellent climate to start doing research up there," Conklin says. "We've been extremely lucky."

As the university grows, many faculty members say it must grapple with problems generated by its attempt to remain, at its heart, interdisciplinary. For example, how does the university organize itself to fairly distribute the funding that is tied to the number of students who are usually counted in a department? The absence of formal departments also raises issues when trying to decide who gets hired where.

"How can one actually promote interdisciplinarity if you're also bean-counting student numbers?" Conklin asks. "It's something both the faculty and provost are struggling with."