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 Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration at Yale University, in collaboration with similar centers at Brown University, the University of Chicago, and Stanford University, has received a $4 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to launch a series of programs that center on questions of race in humanities teaching and scholarship. The partnership will support new efforts to institutionalize the study of race in the humanities on all four campuses.
Historically Black Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina received a $207,600 grant from Qatar University for research on a faster and more efficient method to convert carbon dioxide from plants into fuel.
The University of Rhode Island received a five-year, $1.25 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to assist students from historically underrepresented groups to gain research experience in the biomedical sciences. The grant will provide four students each year with a $10,000 scholarship and a $13,000 stipend, plus additional funds for research materials and travel to conferences. In return, the students will work in a biomedical, behavioral or health sciences research laboratory of their choice for 10 to 15 hours per week conducting research.
Howard University, the historically Black educational institution in Washington, D.C., received a $10 million gift from the Karsh Family Foundation to endow its highly competitive STEM program, which will be renamed the Karsh STEM Scholars Program. Founded in 2017, the program is designed to increase the number of underrepresented minorities earning a Ph.D. or combined MD/Ph.D. in a STEM discipline. The gift is the largest in the university’s history.
