Innovative Research Secures Coveted Fellowships for Ph.D. Students

The ARCS Foundation Northern California awarded five UC Merced graduate students with 2025-26 fellowships. ARCS advances science and technology in the United States by providing financial awards to exceptional graduate-level scholars in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.

In total, the ARCS Foundation Northern California has gifted more than $200,000 in fellowship support to UC Merced since 2022.

This year's ARCS recipients:

• Chemistry and biochemistry Ph.D. student Victor Duran Arroyo, from Oxnard, was named an ARCS Foundation Scholar. His research with Professor Rebeca Arevalo focuses on the design, synthesis and mechanistic elucidation of a new generation of catalysts using cheap Earth-abundant metals for application in pharmaceutical synthesis.

"Thanks to the generosity of the ARCS Foundation, I have been able to purchase critical equipment, accessories, books and software needed to keep advancing in my doctorate program," Arroyo said. "Additionally, I have been able to use the funds to improve my quality of life as a graduate student, which has greatly improved my ability to remain focused on my studies."

• Cognitive and information sciences Ph.D. student Yasemin Gokcen was named a Charlie Campbell Scholar and Carmi & Darrell Ticehurst Scholar by ARCS. This is her second year earning a fellowship from the foundation.

Gokcen's current work involves building computational neuroscience models to understand language and sentence processing with professors David Noelle and Rachel Ryskin.

"This fellowship has opened up so many opportunities, as it means the university and others are interested in and support my research," said Gokcen, who is from Columbus, Ohio. "It has helped me with application and travel to conferences as well as personal costs that I can take care of without worrying or taking away from my studies or research."

• Environmental Systems Ph.D. student Genevieve McKeown-Green was named an ARCS Foundation Scholar. Her current research in Professor Sam Markolf's lab focuses on environmental and energy engineering, investigating the current and future landscape of zero-emission vehicle adoption. McKeown-Green, a native of Acton, a city in the Mojave Desert, will next focus on evaluating the holistic impacts of wildfire on California's solar generation through case studies and modeling.

"It means so much for me to receive this fellowship. When funding for environmental work is being challenged, and people are losing hope for the natural world, it is an extraordinary gift," she said. "This fellowship means I can pursue wildfire research that I have been hoping to begin for several years, attend important conferences to share my work, and connect with a meaningful community of scholars, thinkers and others invested in the future of science and our planet."

• Physics doctoral student Micah Oeur from Long Beach was named a Jane Fuller Gillespie Memorial Scholar by ARCS. Oeur works in Professor Sarah Loebman's lab and uses cosmological zoom-in simulations to study the structure and content of Milky Way-like galaxies, applying a novel technique that combines stellar kinematics and chemistry to recover the galactic mass distribution and probe dark matter.

"Receiving the ARCS fellowship has endowed me with a vibrant community of scientists who are also on the vanguard of research in their respective fields. This sense of community has bolstered my commitment to become an astrophysics professor at a research institution and to support students from marginalized backgrounds," Oeur said. "I have been able to focus more fully on my research, present my dissertation at a national astronomy conference, and submit postdoctoral applications as I advance toward my thesis defense."

• Andrew Silverstein, an environmental systems doctoral student from San Diego, was named an Edina Jennison Scholar by ARCS. Silverstein studies the impact of agrivoltaics on water use efficiency, plant phenology and soil properties in the Central Valley with Professor Sarah Kurtz.

"This fellowship has helped me connect with people across the country and discuss current research by funding travel to conferences. This will help me shape the research I would like to conduct at our future site at UC Merced. This fellowship has also created a community of researchers that I am able to connect with for help with my career in the future," he said.