James Beasley and Stacey Lance, assistant research scientists at UGA’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, received $30,000 from the National Geographic Society to study the sub-lethal effects of chronic exposure to radiation in gray wolves at Chernobyl. The 1986 nuclear disaster in northern Ukraine released large quantities of radioactive particles into the atmosphere, forcing the evacuation of an exclusion zone that still exists today. Beasley and Lance’s research will focus on the effects of radiation exposure to wolves that, in the absence of human competition for resources, have increased significantly in number.