Welcome to Allegheny College’s DSpace repository. Our institutional repository is rich with Allegheny history and important documents, including
- The Documents of Ida M. Tarbell, a digitized collection of papers from the groundbreaking journalist, author, and lecturer
- Civil War letters of Pvt. Willard A. Cutter and Stephen R. Clark
- The Campus student newspaper and The Kaldron student yearbooks.
- Senior Projects (currently available to Allegheny community only)
- Course Syllabi (currently available to Allegheny community only)
Portions of this repository are restricted to current Allegheny students, faculty, and staff. To ensure that you are seeing everything you have access to, please Log In with your Allegheny Username and Password.
Recent Submissions
Item Gut microbiome-diet interactions in wild birds(Wiley, 2025-09-22)Birds show global declines, and understanding the relationship between avian diet and fitness can both answer basic questions in physiological ecology and inform conservation efforts. Diet-induced changes to the gut microbiome, the collection of microorganisms and their functional genes and metabolites inside the gut, may be of particular importance to avian fitness as the gut microbiome provides a suite of beneficial roles for nutrition and immunity of the host. Furthermore, evidence is growing that the gut microbiome may impact animals' diet choices, which could have cascading impacts on avian fitness. Sequencing technologies allow both diet and gut microbial composition and diversity to be characterized from the same fecal sample, creating ripe opportunities to explore diet-microbiome relationships. In this mini-review we summarize the existing literature on the effect of diet category, diet shifts, and dietary diversity on the gut microbiome, and the potential for the gut microbiome to serve as a modulator of diet choice in wild birds. We list open questions in the field of avian diet-microbiome interactions and provide methodology considerations for designing studies to sample both diet and gut microbiomes. This mini-review provides a framework for understanding the reciprocal relationship between diet and gut microbiota in wild birds.Item An updated definition of global health(BMC, 2025-10-28)The most cited definition of global health, published in The Lancet in 2009, defines global health as "an area for study, research, and practice that places a priority on improving health and achieving equity in health for all people worldwide". In this article, we propose an updated definition that expresses the motivations of diverse global health actors and makes One Health and sustainability more visible: "Global health is a field of academic study, research, policy, and applied practice that advances the equitable protection and improvement of population and planetary health". Our "5 Ps model" illustrates global health as a grid that places health for all at the center of two axes representing four domains: (1) People, (2) Planet, (3) Priorities, and (4) Policies and Practices. The people-planet axis spans from social, economic, political, and other systems that affect human health to complex worldwide challenges such as those related to globalization, migration, pandemics, and climate change. The priorities-policies/practices axis positions global health as an action-oriented field in which factors such as human rights, international law, the global burden of disease, and evidence of economic impact inform the financing, implementation, and evaluation of multisectoral partnerships and interventions. We propose using this updated definition and the 5 Ps framework to modernize discussions of the scope and purpose of global health.Item A peacekeeper a day keeps the doctor away? The positive impact of peacekeeping on local-level public health(Chatham House, 2025-11-06)Can peacekeeping improve public health in post-conflict regions? Supporting health care is not a directly mandated task for peacekeepers. I posit that peacekeeping should nonetheless expand health care access and availability through three main pathways. First, peacekeepers facilitate infrastructure (re)building, increasing available health care resources and enabling access to them. Second, expanding perceived security encourages civilians to travel to access care, which medical professionals are more likely available to provide. Third, peacekeepers directly address urgent health needs by supporting humanitarian aid delivery and conducting short-term health-related projects. I pair geocoded data on peacekeeping deployments with survey data on health care access and infrastructure from more than a million households in 32 African states between 1992 and 2022 to evaluate peacekeepers' impact. I find extremely robust support for the role of peacekeepers in supporting public health. Across multiple metrics, including proximity to clean water, treatment coverage for common yet potentially deadly conditions, vaccination access and maternal care, local peacekeeping deployments consistently correlate with substantially expanded health care access. These findings add a vital dimension to our understanding of how peacekeeping supports positive peace and long-term societal well-being in the wake of armed conflict.Item We Contain Multitudes(Phi Beta Kappa Society, 2025-06-01)Item Cloacal microbial diversity is associated with competitive phenotypes in socially polyandrous jacanas(Oxford Univ Press, 2025-10-08)The composition of host-associated microbial communities may correlate with the overall status of the host, including physiology and fitness. New bidirectional hypotheses suggest that sexual behaviors can shape, and be shaped by reproductive microbiomes, which may be particularly important for species with mating systems that feature strong sexual selection. These dynamics have been particularly understudied in female animals. Using 16S rRNA sequencing, we compared the cloacal microbiome of females and males from two socially polyandrous bird species that vary in the strength of sexual selection, Jacana spinosa (Northern Jacana) and J. jacana (Wattled Jacana). We hypothesized that the strength of sexual selection would shape cloacal microbial diversity, such that the more polyandrous J. spinosa would have a more diverse microbiome, and that microbiomes would be more diverse in females than in males. If the reproductive microbiome is indicative of competitive status, we also hypothesized that cloacal microbial diversity would be associated with competitive traits, including plasma testosterone levels, body mass, or weaponry. We found no differences in microbial alpha diversity between species or sexes, but we did find that microbial beta diversity significantly differed between species. We also found a positive relationship between microbial alpha diversity and testosterone in female J. spinosa. Future experiments are needed to explore the potential drivers of correlations between the cloacal microbiome and competitive phenotypes in socially polyandrous jacanas.
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