Alisha Shah

Alisha Shah photo

Sustainability Leadership Fellow Cohort: 2016-2017

Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Biology

Research Summary: Understanding how living organisms respond to a changing climate is a fundamental challenge to biologists. Tolerance to heat is one practical way to measure an organism’s response to climate warming. I measure heat tolerance in aquatic insects found in tropical and temperate streams to find which species are most sensitive to increasing temperatures. Theory suggests that tropical organisms may be considerably more vulnerable to warming than temperate organisms. I test this theory to predict subsequent changes in insect communities, and whether such changes will be more severe in tropical or temperate stream insect communities.