qsb.ucmerced.eduCurrent Students Quantitative and Systems Biology

-- Skip to content Skip to navigation Resources and Information on COVID-19 Ask a Question UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, MERCED Giving Directory Apply Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Search form Search Navigation menu Main menu Who We Are Mission and Values QSB Faculty Facilities Partnerships Governance Join Us Why QSB? Applying to QSB QSB Degrees EEB Concentration MCB Concentration About UC Merced QSB Digital Brochure Current Students Faculty Seminars and Events QSB Seminar Series QSB Annual Retreats Contact Us Apply Tuesday 28 April 2020 Why QSB? aims to accelerate the pace at which paradigm-shifting discoveries transform biology. Masters of Discovery Innovative By Design Previous Pause Next New Concentrations Available QSB is the graduate program that focuses on the biological sciences. It is the largest graduate program at UC Merced, and, by design, is highly integrative and interdisciplinary. The QSB curriculum is largely tailored to the student’s needs and research interests, and the participating faculty comprise a broad cross section of expertise in the biological sciences. The program now offers degrees with elective concentrations in Molecular and Cellular Biology (including biochemistry, molecular biology, cell biology, developmental biology, immunology, microbiology, neurobiology, and physiology) and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology . These elective concentrations appear on transcripts. Accelerating Biological Discovery Through Innovation Whether your passion is to reduce human suffering from disease, mitigate climate-change effects on ecosystems, or advance how we understand, explain and predict living systems, your career will benefit from the unique competitive advantages of a QSB degree. Featured Faculty Chris Amemiya Professor My laboratory is interested in the genetic basis and EvoDevo of vertebrate innovations. Gordon M. Bennett Assistant Professor Evolution of animal-microbial symbioses Betsy Dumont Professor Research focuses on understanding the relationships between morphology, behavior and performance in a variety of vertebrates including bat, carnivoran and avian species. Marcos García-Ojeda Associate Teaching Professor Discipline-Based Education Research, didactic methods, microbiology Arvind Gopinath Assistant Professor The focus of the Gopinath Lab is to combine experimental observations with minimal analytical models, phenomenological mesoscale theories and agent-based discrete computations to understand the origin of function in living matter at scales ranging from the molecular to multicellular. Petra Kranzfelder Assistant Teaching Professor Discipline-Based Education Research, biology teaching and learning methods, entomology and aquatic ecology Joel Spencer Assistant Professor The Spencer lab is involved in engineering new optical imaging technologies and using these technologies to study, in vivo, the microenvironments and cellular dynamics within tissues. Shahar Sukenik Assistant Professor Biophysical chemistry, structural biology; Understanding the interplay between proteins and their environment by combining biophysical methods and live cell microscopy David Ardell The Ardell Laboratory at UC Merced is a computational biology lab that uses machine learning, data science and multi-scale theoretical models to... Associate Professor Computational biology and evolution of gene expression mechanisms Miriam Barlow Professor Experimental evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria Laura Beaster-Jones Assistant Teaching Professor Discipline-Based Education Research--student self-efficacy and motivations Anna Beaudin The primary research focus of the Beaudin Lab is to understand the contribution of fetal hematopoietic, or blood, progenitors to immune function across... Assistant Professor Developmental basis of normal and abnormal immune development Michael Beman Associate Professor Microbial ecology and biogeochemical cycling in the oceans Jessica Blois Associate Professor Terrestrial paleoecology, niche and community modeling and phylochronology Wei-Chun Chin Professor Polymer physics and engineering of cellular and environmental systems Michael Cleary Associate Professor Post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression during nervous system development Michael Colvin Classical molecular dynamics is the simulation of chemicals using the simplest atomistic model where each atom is a tiny mass with a charge interconnected... Professor Classical molecular dynamics simulations of flexible proteins and nucleic acids. Michael Dawson Professor Evolutionary ecology, biogeography and phylogeography of marine invertebrates. Eva De Alba The de Alba lab studies the molecular and mechanistic bases of cellular processes essential to life from a biochemical and biophysics perspective. We... Acting Associate Professor The de Alba lab studies the molecular and mechanistic bases of cellular processes essential to life from a biochemical and biophysics perspective. Danielle Edwards Assistant Professor Ecological, phenotypic, genomic and behavioral evolution of reptiles and amphibians; Conservation genetics/genomics Ariel Escobar Professor Calcium in cardiac cellular signaling and techniques to study cardiac cells in vivo Carolin Frank It is now widely recognized that microbiomes dictate many traits of their host. For example, the plant microbiome can act as a second immune system,... Associate Professor Plant microbiomes; function, community assembly, transmission, and dispersal. Xuecai Ge We are interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms of neurodevelopment and its related diseases, focusing on the primary cilium, an antenna-like... Assistant Professor Cell signaling in neural development, brain tumors and neurological disorders Ajay Gopinathan Professor Theory at the interface of biophysics and soft condensed matter physics Juris Grasis Dr. Juris Grasis leads a research team utilizing viral metagenomics to investigate viral ecology and evolution in host-associated systems. Further, the... Assistant Professor Viral metagenomics, systems immunology, microbiome regulation, viral/antiviral discovery Stephen Hart Professor Terrestrial microbial and ecosystem ecology, plant-soil interactions Aaron Hernday Assistant Professor Epigenetic and transcriptional networks and metabolic engineering of yeasts Linda Hirst Professor Experimental soft matter physics and biophysics Katrina Hoyer Assistant Professor Immunological tolerance and auto-immune disease, regulatory T cells Kirk Jensen Assistant Professor Parasite pathogenesis and immunology, toxoplasma and host-immune responses Shilpa Khatri Assistant Professor Numerical Analysis, Fluid Dynamics, Applied Math, Applications in Biology and Oceanography Changqing Li Assistant Professor Cancer imaging, cancer therapy, fluorescence molecular tomography, x-ray imaging, biomedical imaging system and algorithm Bin Liu Assistant Professor Transport of microorganisms in complex environments, mechanics of biological media and mechanical metamaterials Andy LiWang Professor NMR spectroscopy, structural biology, biochemistry, molecular mechanisms of biological clocks Patricia LiWang Professor The P. LiWang Lab uses protein biochemistry to study HIV prevention, HIV eradication, and anti-inflammatory strategies. Gabriella Loots Adjunct Associate Professor Limb and skeletal development, genetics of bone metabolism, transcriptomics Jennifer Manilay Professor Developmental immunology, cell fate regulation, hematopoiesis Kara McCloskey Associate Professor Stem cell and tissue engineering for regenerative medicine applications Emily Jane McTavish Assistant Professor Computational approaches to big trees and big data: phylogenetics, genomics, and the Open Tree of Life Emily Moran Assistant Professor Evolutionary ecology of plant responses to environmental change Victor Muñoz Professor Our group’s research interests are on the areas of biophysics, structural/computational biology and synthetic molecular biology. Wi...