This spring, PEEC graduate student Shasta Kamara was awarded the Graduate College's Dissertation Completion Fellowship. This fellowship helps outstanding Illinois graduate students complete the doctoral degree by providing a 9-month stipend, along with waivers of tuition, service fee, health service fee, AFMFA fee, and library/IT fee.
Kamara's dissertation research focuses on paddlefish, investigating their interactions with anglers across different temperatures and how their life history strategies and thermal tolerances vary throughout their broad latitudinal range. Working with state and federal partners, she combines laboratory and field studies to examine how temperature influences paddlefish stress responses, post-release behavior, thermal tolerance, and life history strategies across stocks. Her research provides insight into how warming environments may affect paddlefish recovery following capture and other stressors. Over the long term, climate change may alter the species' distribution as temperatures approach or exceed their thermal limits, while also influencing life history patterns that are important for conservation and management.