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.
Clemson University has been awarded a two-year $347,263 grant from the National Institutes of Health to conduct research on a cure for African sleeping sickness. The disease is spread by the tsetse fly and 60 million people in sub-Saharan are at risk of getting the disease, which can be fatal without treatment.
Historically Black Florida A&M University in Tallahassee received $700,000 in grants over three years from the U.S. Department of Education to help the university recruit underrepresented minority students to STEM degree programs at the university. The funds will be used to establish a pre-college bridge program that will be held on campus for five weeks during the summer.
Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, has received a three-year, $150,000 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for a project to digitize the college’s Oliver Otis Howard Papers collection. An estimated 150,000 pages of documents are in the collection. Howard was a Maine native and graduate of Bowdoin who went on to become a Union general in the Civil War. He later was the director of the Freedman’s Bureau. Historically Black Howard University in Washington, D.C. is named in his honor.
The Scheie Eye Institute at the University of Pennsylvania received a five-year, $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study genetic risk factors that contribute to a higher incidence of primary open-angle glaucoma among African Americans.
