The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) will honor late wildlife biologist Kendra Chan through the Kendra Chan Conservation Fellowship, designed to give emerging scientists the opportunity to help endangered species.
Chan was a wildlife biologist for the USFWS in Southern California. In 2019, Chan was one of 34 people killed in the Conception boat fire off Santa Cruz Island, according to a report by the Ventura County Star.
“Kendra was passionate and curious and ready to take on new challenges,” Chris Diel, an assistant field supervisor with the Fish and Wildlife Service in Ventura, told Medium.
According to the report, Diel helped form a team to design the fellowship, combining the Service’s Directorate Fellowship Program with the Ecological Society of America’s Leadership Development Program.
“She was able to bring everyone together to achieve conservation goals — from academia to agencies to private landowners,” Diel said. “She brought positivity and inspiration that those common outcomes were possible.”
The fellowship is a two-year commitment and is available to undergraduate seniors pursuing conservation, USFWS stated.
“After losing Kendra as a member of our team and our agency, we asked the question, how can we carry on and embody that potential that we saw, and the traits we observed in her, into the future?” Diel added.
Chan earned a Bachelor of Science in Evolution, Ecology, and Biodiversity at the University of California Davis in 2015 and worked for the Marine Science Institute before joining the USFWS, her obituary states. She dedicated much of her life to coastal ecology, the VC Star reported.
According to the Santa Barbara Independent, Daniel Cisneros—a senior at UC Santa Barbara— is the first recipient of the Kendra Chan Conservation Fellowship.
He spends his time in the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden’s Pritzlaff Conservation Center, testing how seed viability changes, the report states.
