Meadville, Pa. – Sept. 5, 2008 – Allegheny College has received a grant of $487,613 from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation to purchase three major instruments for departments in the college's natural science division. The equipment, to be used for teaching and faculty-student research, will be shared among the departments of biology, chemistry, environmental science, geology, neuroscience and physics.
Allegheny will purchase a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GC-MS), a Raman spectrometer with microprobe, and a scanning electron microscope (SEM) with X-ray probe. These instruments will significantly enhance the ability of Allegheny students and faculty to visualize and analyze a wide range of materials ranging from molecular structures to biological tissues to geological minerals.
“Non-majors and students in beginning science classes will experience the power of modern instrumentation to illuminate the concepts they study,” Dean of the College Linda DeMeritt said. “And upper-level science majors, including student researchers, will be able to use more refined and powerful tools that increase the significance and relevance of their experiments.”
Allegheny is one of 40 colleges recognized in Loren Pope's book Colleges That Change Lives, where he writes that the college “has a long and distinguished record of producing … future scientists and scholars.”
Allegheny ranks in the top 5 percent of schools whose graduates go on to earn Ph.D.s in all fields, in the top 4 percent in the science disciplines, and in the top 2 percent for producing chemistry Ph.D.s., according to data from the Higher Education Data Sharing (HEDS) Consortium Study of the Doctorate Records File for the decade 1995-2004.
On a percentage basis, Allegheny produces twice as many scientists as the top rated research universities. During the past decade, about 30 percent of Allegheny's students have graduated with degrees in the sciences annually. The national average is 23 percent.
