The hallways of Steffee Hall of Life Sciences buzzed with a nervous energy on the afternoons of Monday, April 20, and Tuesday, April 21 — the kind that comes from years of work and finally presenting it to an audience. The biology department’s annual Senior Project Symposium brought 35 graduating seniors together to present research they had designed and defended over the course of their final year. From agricultural pest control to public health policy, the researchers behind these topics varied: athletes, future dentists and doctors and others were each drawn to science by a different strung-together thread of curiosity.
Emma Milligan and her contrast baths
For Emma Milligan, ’29, the question started in the training room. Specifically, the Allegheny women’s soccer team. As a member of the team, she had spent seasons cycling through ice baths and recovery routines to get ready for scrimmages and games. But she found herself genuinely unsure whether it actually helped or not.
“I was really interested in seeing what they actually helped with in terms of performance,” she said in an interview with The Campus after her presentation.
That curiosity became the core part of a six-week observational study examining how contrast water therapy affected athletic performance in Allegheny’s women’s soccer players. 19 teammates signed on, but only 10 completed the study. Milligan said that she initially planned to group the women by position, but she didn’t get enough to sign on to make that happen. Participants wore heart rate monitor bands during practices and games, generating data on time spent in high-intensity heart rate zones, distance covered and overall training workload. Milligan’s hypothesis was that contrast therapy would come out on top, followed by heat, with cold in last place.
The results, however, didn’t align with the hypothesis. Statistical analysis showed no significant effect of the water immersion treatments on any of the biological data collected.
“The evidence suggests that water immersion of any kind does not affect athletic performance,” Milligan said, adding that this was consistent with some existing literature pointing in the same direction.
Milligan was candid about the study’s limitations, such as the small sample size, the challenge of getting college athletes to consistently submit weekly surveys and the fact that only one participant used hot water immersion for long enough to draw conclusions. She outlined perfectly clear instructions for future research, including the addition of a recovery survey, which assessed how athletes feel after treatment correlating with what their heart rate monitor says.
Milligan, a biology major with a minor in global health studies, is heading home after graduation to pursue genetics research. She thanked her teammates for their warmth.
“I would not have been able to do this research without the women’s soccer team,” she said.
Elizabeth Davidson and the mean bean fightin’ machine
Elizabeth Davidson, ’29, did not have a single “aha” moment. Her senior thesis, an investigation into why common bean plants resist the bean beetle, Callosobruchus maculatus, while cowpeas do not, grew out of years of independent study, failed experiments and a frustrating pill press (that was actually donated to the college for use).
The bean beetle is a pest that is native to tropical and subtropical regions, laying its eggs on seed coats and following larvae to eat seeds from the inside out. Davidson’s research focused on phytohemagglutinin (PHA), a lectin protein that binds to carbohydrates found in high concentrations in common beans like kidney beans. Previous studies had shown that lectin could kill beetle larvae in isolated feeding experiments. Davidson’s main focus was to determine whether PHA is actually responsible for the resistance seen across many common bean varieties.
To find out, she studied pinto bean strains that produce little to none of the lectin protein and compared them to varieties that are known to be resistant, with cowpeas as a positive control (adults expected) and red kidney beans as a negative control (no adults expected). She checked egg counts weekly, then monitored the adult beetle emergence over six weeks.
The results were surprising. No adults emerged from any of the common bean varieties, including the PHA-deficient pinto strains.
“I was incorrect in my hypothesis,” Davidson said. “PHA may not even be that important, although I can’t determine that for sure.”
With this new evidence, she would now take her research towards a different direction: if PHA isn’t the main line of defense, what is? Davidson pointed to a substance called phaseolin, a storage protein abundant in common beans and certain isoflavones as promising candidates for future study.
She also developed a secondary project: using a mechanical press to create artificial beans from ground cowpea meal, allowing future researchers to run experiments without the interference problems that eliminate capsule-based methods. Adults did emerge from her artificial beans, with fewer from natural cowpeas, which showed that it could be a working concept.
Davidson, a biology major with a minor in political science, has an academic and professional background that she is proud of. She blends science with archival work; in 2024 she helped digitize the writings of naturalist Evelyn Anderson in partnership with the Presque Isle Audubon Society. That type of painstaking, detail-dense work, Davidson said, is evident in her research that spanned multiple growing cycles and required daily lab check-ins to track beetle ages.
Julia Bennett and a big public health question
Julia Bennett, ’29, is headed to the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine School of Dental Medicine this summer, and she wanted her senior project to revolve around this next aspect of her life. So, she picked a question with real stakes: Does community water fluoridation actually reduce the number of people going to the emergency room with dental issues?
Bennett conducted a study using data from Meadville Medical Center’s emergency room, covering 4,500 patient admissions between January 2014 and December 2024. A critical point she looked at was August 2019, when fluoride was first added to Meadville’s public water supply. She split the patient admissions into two sections — before and after fluoridation — and used logistic regression to analyze whether fluoride exposure was associated with fewer “fluroide-preventable” ER admissions, which would be dental-related visits that could be caused or worsened by tooth decay, while controlling variables like age, insurance status and race.
Her research yielded a clear conclusion. Patients in the fluoride-exposure section had a 64% reduction in the odds of being admitted for a fluoride-preventable condition compared to the pre-fluoridation section. That result is within the range reported in prior literature, which shows that the community water fluoridation can decrease dental caries prevalence by 50 to 75%.
Bennett, a biology major with a global health minor, received her data with Institutional Review Board approval, and with redacted information, which removed names, addresses, and personal details.
“My research adds to literature supporting community water fluoridation as a preventative measure for dental caries,” Bennett said, noting that her timing for this study was intentional. With public skepticism about fluoride growing alongside broader misinformation about water safety, she saw an opportunity to contribute to her community by adding data-grounded evidence to a debate that often has not had it.
