David BolingbrokeThe College of Arts and Sciences at WSU awarded David Bolingbroke a 2016 Boeing Graduate Fellowship in Environmental Studies. This fellowship provides him with $1,000 dollars research travel funding towards his dissertation.  Congratulations, David!

Bordering the Tri-Cities, Washington, Hanford is the largest nuclear cleanup site in the world. It once produced the United States’ plutonium stockpile during World War II and the Cold War. Now, workers are tasked with cleaning up the contaminants left behind and restoring the Columbia River and Plateau environment. My dissertation project—tentatively titled, “Atomic Restoration: An Environmental History of the Hanford Nuclear Site”—will tell the story of how ecologists, local residents, and on-site workers responded to the release of radioactive particles into the region’s natural environment. In particular, it will focus on the role of animals and how they help us to understand the new scientific knowledge system and place that Hanford created. The Boeing Graduate Fellowship in Environmental Studies provides me with the funding to travel to Washington D.C. and conduct research in the Atomic Energy Commission Archives. This research will be vital in building my chapters on Cold War Era ecologists and their study of radioactivity’s effect on living things.