UC Merced Magazine | Volume XIX, Issue VII

The process of building a university never ends, but reaching R1 status is a critical milestone in UC Merced’s history.

“It was not a top-down decision,” Camfield said. ere was a “serious, energetic” debate in town halls, special meetings, labs and offices. Laura Martin was executive director of the Academic Senate at the time. “ e academic plan that emerged was about research, teaching and our commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion,” said Martin, now the provost’s chief of sta . “It was an important step toward R1.” Doubling Down on Possibilities Construction for the four-year, $1.2 billion Merced 2020 Project was completed in the fall of its namesake year. New spaces for research, education, recreation, and student housing and wellness meant a vast upgrade in possibilities. Researchers moved labs and offices into the new Arts and Computational Sciences and Biomedical Sciences and Physics buildings. Move-ins couldn’t happen immediately, though — the COVID-19 pandemic still emptied the campus. In-person instruction didn’t resume until spring 2022.

Hratchian, who took heart at the sight of construction cranes, now enjoys walking through what those cranes created. When he came to UC Merced in 2013, he said, “In the winter, that land was a swamp. It was tall grass in the summer, probably filled with snakes and rats. If you wandered into it, you wouldn’t return. “Now I stand amid all those buildings and think, ‘A group of us came here and we did a thing.’ And that’s really satisfying.” A Familiar Environment Michael Scheibner grew up on a family farm in a tiny German village. “ ere were more cows, chickens and pigs than people,” he said. e pastures and livestock surrounding UC Merced had a personal appeal when the physics professor joined the faculty in 2009. “It was exciting to see, on one hand, the agriculture that is part of my past, alongside the future of advancing technologies that allow us to sustain agriculture,” Scheibner said.

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