UC Merced Scientists Among Global Elite Shaping AI, Climate and Health
UC Merced continues to demonstrate its growing influence on the global stage.
Several faculty members landed on Clarivate’s 2025 list of the world’s most‑cited researchers. The honor is reserved for the top 1% of scholars whose work has shaped their fields over the last 10 years. Clarivate, which produces journal impact factors and other analytics, says the award identifies the world’s most influential researchers.
Researchers have always advanced scientific understanding by building upon the discoveries of those who came before them. Today, they publish in peer‑reviewed journals. Their work is evaluated by experts before it is shared with the wider community. In every new paper, authors show how their work fits into the larger scientific story by citing earlier research, then clearly laying out the fresh insights and contributions their latest study brings to the field.
For UC Merced, the Clarivate recognition reflects a mature and fast‑advancing research enterprise rooted in Central Valley priorities — water, wildfire, climate resilience and equitable innovation — and extending into frontier areas such as artificial intelligence. Recognition on the Highly Cited list is a marker of UC Merced’s trajectory: a young campus now operating at top‑tier research intensity, producing scholarship that shapes its fields and its region.
As Clarivate’s President of Academia and Government Bar Veinstein put it in announcing the 2025 list, the honorees “advance innovation and inspire the global research community to tackle society’s greatest challenges with creativity and ingenuity.”
For the Valley, that means world‑class research rooted in local needs. Merced’s labs thrive on close student‑faculty collaboration, often with undergraduates contributing to published research — an opportunity that can be rarer at older, larger institutions.
Ming‑Hsuan Yang, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, has appeared on the Highly Cited list annually since 2018, helped by seminal work in face detection, object tracking and representation learning. Now, his group is pushing into vision‑language models — systems that connect images and text and increasingly power generative tools and reasoning engines. Making the list again, he said, shows he has not peaked.
“I’m still doing the work,” he said. “I’m still making a good impact. I’m glad people use my work and build on top of it. On the other hand, I also build on other people’s work, so it goes both ways.”
Yang maintains an active research role in industry while leading UC Merced students in cutting-edge computer vision.
Distinguished Professor Martin Hagger, the only recipient from the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, is recognized on the list for a sustained body of work in social and health psychology spanning self-control, determinants of health behavior, and theory integration. Hagger’s lab at UC Merced focuses on how beliefs, motivation and habits translate into real world behavior change. Hagger made the list for the fourth consecutive year. In 2025, Hagger was promoted to distinguished professor, received UC Merced’s Senate Award for Distinction in Research and was elected a fellow of the American Psychological Association.
One of Hagger’s most cited papers examines ego depletion—the idea that people’s self-control is limited and depletes, leading to lapses in impulse control. His work challenged that idea and received widespread attention, including media coverage in 2016.
“Highly cited authors might contribute to a department’s research reputation — having authors whose research is highly cited is a hallmark of a research-intensive culture at a university and suggests that the department and the university conduct very high-impact research,” Hagger explained. “As the department and UC Merced more broadly have moved toward achieving very high research intensity status, including reaching R1 status last year, the reputation of the research produced by its faculty is important.”
UC Merced’s cross-field recognition also extends to biochemistry and public health through Emeritus Distinguished Professor Henry Jay Forman, a pioneering scholar in free radical biology and redox signaling. Forman, one of the campus’s founding faculty members, has served in national leadership roles and continues to contribute to research and publishing.
In a year when Los Angeles was devastated by wildfires, climate experts John Abatzoglou, a professor in management of complex systems, and Professor Crystal Kolden, director of the campus’s Fire Resilience Center, were sought after by media and highly cited by their peers.
Both appear on the 2025 Highly Cited list. Abatzoglou is listed in both environment and ecology and geosciences, reflecting the breadth of his climate science portfolio. His lab develops datasets and tools that help communities, agencies and land managers understand climate variability and anticipate impacts.
Kolden, a pyrogeographer, focuses on the human environment dimensions of wildfire, from prescribed fire and mitigation to recovery planning. She is a recognized expert in community-focused resilience strategies.
“We’re public servants to the people of California first and foremost, especially at a school like UC Merced,” Kolden said. “It’s always an honor when your peers cite your research, because it means your work has impact. But my goal is always to reduce the potential for the wildfire disasters that destroy peoples’ lives.”
Yang’s AI work positions UC Merced at the frontier of a field transforming health care, agriculture and education; his students and collaborators help fuel a growing California talent pipeline. Hagger’s research informs interventions tied to chronic disease and mental health — key concerns in the Central Valley — and his international collaboration in Finland brings global insights back to campus.
Clarivate emphasizes that citation activity is only the starting point. The list is refined using quantitative metrics, qualitative analysis and expert judgment, with explicit attention to research integrity. That approach reflects how UC Merced faculty describe their work — impact rooted in collaboration, mentorship and openness.
“I have had a lot of great graduate students, and I really have to thank them,” Yang said. “They’re doing well, and I hope that making this list and helping raise the university’s profile draws even more highly qualified graduate students to our labs.”