Colby recently was awarded an IDEA grant for his honors thesis. English Professor James Kimbrell is supervising Colby’s thesis, which, is centered on the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the following consequences as a result. The IDEA grant will help fund Colby’s upcoming documentary on Chernobyl. He will travel during the summer of 2018 to Chernobyl, Kiev, and Slavutych, a small, workers town, to conduct interviews with current or past workers and residents of the Chernobyl area. He also will interview and research the “resettlers” of the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Colby will use these interviews as the basis for a series of short stories within the historical fiction genre.