A leading expert in soil biogeochemistry and environmental engineering, UC Merced Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, brings her research and perspective to a global conversation about the future of our planet.
Berhe, the Ted & Jan Falasco Chair in Earth Sciences and Geology and director of the UC Merced Earth Institute (formerly Sierra Nevada Research Institute), is one of the scientists interviewed in the new documentary “Groundswell.”
Professors Asmeret Asefaw Berhe and Ming-Hsuan Yang have been named 2025 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals.
They are among the nearly 500 scientists, engineers and innovators who have been recognized this year for their distinguished scientific and social achievements.
Professors Roger Bales and Martha Conklin arrived in Merced in 2003, the first non-administrative faculty members at UC Merced. They came with a vision: to create a research university that would serve California’s future.
Now, after more than 22 years of building institutions, mentoring and pioneering environmental research, Bales has retired from UC Merced.
When Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe arrived at UC Merced in 2009, she and her husband, Professor Teamrat Ghezzehei, were leaving major research institutions to join a brand-new campus in California’s Central Valley. It was a leap of faith — one made easier by the Sierra Nevada Research Institute.
More than 100 million land mines remain buried around the world, posing a threat in approximately 70 countries and territories, and killing or injuring about 5,000 people, most of them civilians, every year.
As the world’s geopolitical landscape shifts, nine scientists studying different aspects of warfare ecology from seven countries — Poland, Ukraine, Norway, Spain, the United States, Finland and Croatia — are warning against the growing deployment of land mines as countries bordering Russia withdraw from global conventions restricting their use.
