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.
Howard University, the historically Black educational institution in the nation’s capital, has received a four-year, $400,062 grant from the Army Research Office of the U.S. Department of Defense for research on the chemical dynamics of energetic materials under extreme conditions of high pressure and high temperature. The research is under the direction of Mohammad F. Mahmood, professor of mathematics at Howard.
The School of Nursing at Western Carolina University received a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to increase the number of students from underrepresented groups in rural areas in the field of nursing.
Kansas State University received a five-year, $13.7 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development for a program to increase food production in the African nations of Ethiopia, Niger, and Senegal. Under the program, the university will establish the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Collaborative Research on Sorghum and Millet on campus.
The African Development Bank has approved a $45 million grant to establish the Pan African University. The new university which will have five campuses that will concentrate on space science, water and energy sciences, social sciences and humanities, technology and innovation, and earth and life sciences. Three sites have been selected; Kenya, Nigeria, and Cameroon. There is a major need for trained scientists as Africa looks to develop. There are only 35 scientists and engineers for every million people in Africa. The comparable number in the United States is 4,103.
The University of South Florida in Tampa received a $267,732 grant from the National Institute of Nursing Research for a study on ways to reduce HIV/AIDS risk among college-age African American women. The project will be under the direction of Rasheeta D. Chandler, an assistant professor of nursing at the university. Dr. Chandler is a graduate of Florida A&M University in Tallahassee and holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of South Florida.
The University of Central Florida has received a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for programs to increase the number of students from underrepresented minority groups in nursing degree programs.
