COGNITIVE & INFORMATION SCIENCES focuses on how cognition and intelligent behaviors emerge in systems of variable size and structure, ranging from individuals to groups of individuals, including artificial agents; applied to compelling problems in social cognition, human dimensions of information technologies, artificial intelligence ethics, and individual and collective decision making under uncertainty.
ECONOMICS & BUSINESS MANAGEMENT focuses on empirical microeconomic analysis using advanced econometric techniques to identify causal effects and economic mechanisms, with the goal of guiding effective policy design and efficient resource allocation; applied to compelling problems in health, environment, income and savings, innovation, migration and education.
MANAGEMENT OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS focuses on how to reconcile sustainability-oriented decision making and management of complex coupled human-technological-natural systems with the constraints imposed by holistic “people, planet, and profit” values; applied to compelling problems in service system innovation, climate change, land and natural resource management, and information systems.
POLITICAL SCIENCE is a social science discipline concerned with study of governments, public policies, political processes, systems, and political behavior. Political science at UC Merced is a vibrant community of scholars seeking to understand the world through analyses of political institutions and political behavior. We strive to produce research that is relevant across disciplines, innovative, and theoretically and empirically rigorous. We are a group that is unconstrained by traditional disciplinary boundaries. Our faculty and students advance the study of politics in pursuit of not only scholarly understanding but also the broader well-being of society.
