Here is this week’s news of grants or gifts to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.
The University of Maryland at College Park received a three-year, $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for programs to increase the participation of women and members of underrepresented groups in STEM disciplines. The study will explore diversity and participation in the STEM field by examining a variety of issues, including the role of race/ethnicity and gender in study partners and peer groups and the likelihood of STEM students of certain backgrounds experiencing discrimination from faculty. The research is under the direction of Julie L. Park, an assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland. She is the author of When Diversity Drops: Race, Religion, and Affirmative Action in Higher Education (Rutgers University Press, 2013).
Mount Mary University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, received a $650,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to expand opportunities for women from underrepresented groups in STEM fields. The grant will allow the university to offer scholarships for 18 students over the next five years in the fields of biology, chemistry and food science chemistry. The Jewel Scholars program is named after the late African American scientist Jewel Plummer Cobb, who served as president of California State University, Fullerton from 1981 to 1990.
The University of Chicago received a $1.45 million grant to support its Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellows Program. The program will support the hiring of instructors from underrepresented groups with the hope that after a two-year period they will be hired to the tenure-track faculty at the university.
North Carolina Central University, the historically Black educational institution in Durham, received a four-year, $2 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to fund research on a particularly aggressive type of cancer known as inflammatory breast cancer, which disproportionately impacts African-American women.
The University of Houston received a $281,475 grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to fund a research project that will involve the training of 40 low-income students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups who will be sent out to educate the public about obesity and nutrition.
Michigan State University received a five-year, $13 million grant from the MasterCard Foundation that will fund programs to help 15,000 young people in Tanzania and Nigeria develop entrepreneurship opportunities in horticulture, aquaculture, poultry, cassava, and oilseed production.
The University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis received a $5.2 million grant from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to establish a program that will recruit African American men and women who have been diagnosed with diabetes. The group will be administered one of three plans to help the African Americans manage their diabetes with the goal of determining best practices that can be used in the future.
