The new University of California campus in Merced, CA opened for undergraduate students in September 2005 as the newest of the 10-campus UC system and the first new US research university of the 21st century. A central mission of UC Merced is to serve the ethnically and economically diverse population of California's San Joaquin Valley. The San Joaquin Valley is the most diverse, fastest growing and economically disadvantaged part of California. Approximately 50% of UC Merced's student body are first-generation college students and a large fraction are from groups under-represented in universities. Notably, over 30% of the student body is Hispanic, and UC Merced has been approved for official U.S. Department of Education status as an Hispanic Serving Institution, making it one of only a handful of universities with this distinction nationwide. The PI is committed to involving students from underrepresented groups in undergraduate research through the RUI component of this grant.
The molecular dynamics community has a well established tradition of software tools that are developed and maintained by individual research groups and freely distributed to very large user bases. These established channels will be used to freely distribute all of the software tools developed in this project in source code format along with documentation and test data sets.