Here is this week’s news of grants to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.
The department of nursing at historically Black North Carolina Central University received a $100,000 grant from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina. The grant money will be used to provide new technology for the training of nursing students and to underwrite research opportunities for these students.
Jackson State University, the historically Black educational institution in Mississippi, received a $5.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to establish the Transdisciplinary Center of Excellence on National Health Disparities. The center will conduct research on racial disparities in healthcare with the goal of translating research findings into improvements in patient care, community health, and the education and training of health disparity researchers and practitioners.
The new center will be under the direction of Marinelle Payton, assistant dean for research in the College of Public Service and associate professor in department of epidemiology and biostatistics at Jackson State University. Dr. Payton is a graduate of the M.D./Ph.D. program at Boston University and holds a master of public health degree from Harvard University.
North Carolina State University in Raleigh received a $252,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for a research project to determine more effective methods for disseminating information on HIV/AIDS to college-age African American women. In North Carolina, HIV infections run 41 percent higher than the national average and Black women are 15 times more likely than White women to be infected with HIV.
The research will be conducted by Fay Cobb Payton, an associate professor of information systems at North Carolina State and James Kiwanuka-Tondo, an associate professor of communication at the university. Dr. Payton is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology. She holds an MBA from Clark Atlanta University and a Ph.D. in information and decision systems from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Dr. Kiwanuka-Tondo is a graduate of Makerere University in Uganda. He holds a master’s degree from the University of Leicester in England and a second master’s degree and a Ph.D. in communication science from the University of Connecticut.
