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 Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles will lead a major study on African American men with prostate cancer. The $26.5 million study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute and the Prostate Cancer Foundation, will examine why Black men are more likely than other men to develop prostate cancer and why they are more likely to die from the disease.
Elizabeth City State University, the historically Black educational institution in North Carolina, received a $100,000 donation from Stephanie D.B. Johnson to establish an endowed scholarship fund. Dr. Johnson is a trustee of the university and her late husband Darnell chaired the department of mathematics at the university.
The University of Alabama received a four-year, $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for its Scholarships for Disadvantaged Students program for graduate students in nursing and to support the university’s Nurse Faculty Loan Program. Doctoral students who sign on to the program will receive loans to offset tuition. and will pledge to serve as nursing faculty after graduation. Upon gaining a faculty post, the former students will be eligible for loan forgiveness.
Historically Black Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, received a $149,466 grant from the National Science Foundation to support the creation of minor degree program in data science. The grant program is under the direction of Felesia Stukes, an assistant professor of computer science at the university.
The Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville received a two-year, $250,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to develop a new way to measure trust in African American men as it relates to health care. It is hoped that addressing trust issues will result in helping African American men feel more comfortable in seeking out health care, improve their health outcomes, and narrow racial health disparities.
Hampton University, the historically Black educational institution in Virginia, received a four-year, $1,269,500 grant from the National Institutes of Health for research on pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive and usually fatal disease of the lung that impacts African Americans at twice the rate of Whites.
