Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, & Creative Activities

Where does your food actually come from? First- and second-year environmental science and sustainability (ESS) students at Allegheny College wanted to know. But, even more, they wanted to understand how to make agriculture sustainable for all.  Those students — enrolled in the spring semester in the Soil to Plate: World Food and Agriculture course — [...]

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Allegheny College student Megan Collins ’22 is hoping to disprove misconceptions about one of the most widely feared but misunderstood creatures — the tarantula.  As an environmental science & sustainability major and psychology minor, Collins says the goal of her Senior Comp is to create an environmental education program about tarantulas to help people become [...]

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Walking through Bousson Experimental Forest reveals towering trees, small streams, occasional glimpses of white-tail deer, and frequent cries of songbirds. Yet we usually give little thought to what lies underfoot. To most, it’s just dirt. But forest soils are critically important in climate change investigations. Forests absorb enormous amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, [...]

Continue Reading "The Dirt on Allegheny College’s DIRT Experiment"

The 49th annual Western Pennsylvania Undergraduate Psychology Conference (WPUPC) will be held at Allegheny College on Saturday, April 30.  “Allegheny’s Psychology Department is honored and excited to host this year’s WPUPC conference and to welcome students from colleges and universities in Northwest Pennsylvania to showcase their work,” said Lydia Eckstein, Ph.D., associate professor and chair [...]

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Allegheny College, one of the nation’s oldest and most innovative four-year colleges where multidisciplinary learning breaks the conventional mold, will host the Fifth World Symposium on Sustainable Development at Universities (WSSD-U-2022), June 16–17, 2022. This year’s symposium focuses on “Educating the Sustainability Leaders of the Future” and will contribute to development of this fast-growing field. [...]

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Allegheny College student Fenn Kathman ’23 has been awarded the American Psychology-Law Society’s Broadening Representation, Inclusivity, Diversity, and Global Equity (BRIDGE) Committee Diversity Travel Award for their research.  Kathman’s project, “Effects of Race and Gender on Perception of Exonerees: An Intersectional Approach,” was completed last summer in collaboration with Professors Christopher Normile, Lupita Gonzalez, and [...]

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Together, Pennsylvania and New York use 1,215,660 tons of road salt each winter to melt snow and ice. Allegheny College student Mary Allen ’22 used her Senior Comprehensive Project to examine the negative impact of road salt on the environment — and to explore more eco-friendly alternatives to help keep travelers safe.  “I am extremely [...]

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Allegheny College Professor of Biology Ron Mumme has been named a 2021 Honorary Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science. Mumme is one of five fellows elected from undergraduate institutions out of 141 total fellows in the biological sciences. Honored [...]

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Dams may provide an inexpensive source of renewable energy, but their construction comes at a cost: disrupting natural habitats, releasing greenhouse gases, and displacing communities. Allegheny College students took an active role in the international community by assessing a hydroelectric dam’s potential impact in the Republic of Georgia.  For over two years, stakeholders in the [...]

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Professor Beth Choate challenged her Allegheny College students to tackle the global issue of plastic waste at a local level. Knowing that 37 million tons of plastic waste are produced annually in the U.S., Choate encouraged students in her Research Methods class to investigate how often — and why — Allegheny students turned to single-use water bottles instead [...]

Continue Reading "A Refill Revolution"