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 Arkansas at Pine Bluff, a historically Black educational institution, is participating in a $6.1 million grant program led by the University of Arkansas and funded by the National Science Foundation that will establish a research institute focused on virology and virus ecology. The goal is to establish fundamental Rules of Life, or laws of virology that apply to all viruses – or at least large sets of virus systems. Anissa Buckner, professor and chair of the department of biology will lead the research effort at the Pine Bluff campus.
The University of Houston College of Medicine has received a $1 million grant from Bank of America to support the medical school’s commitment to increase primary care access in underserved urban and rural communities. In recognition of Bank of America’s commitment, the main lobby of the new three-story, 130,000-square-foot College of Medicine building, currently under construction on the University of Houston campus, will be named after the company.
Historically Black Dillard University in New Orleans has received a $1 million grant over two years from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to support its Center for Racial Justice. The center’s mission is to bring “systemic change to the way policing is done in communities of color and to promote partnerships with law enforcement, including police departments and sheriff’s offices, graduate, and professional schools.”
Princeton University in New Jersey has been awarded two grants, totaling over $600,000, from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Both three-year grants will support the Princeton Ethiopian, Eritrean and Egyptian Miracles of Mary digital humanities project, a comprehensive resource for the miracle stories written about the Virgin Mary in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Egypt, and preserved in Gəˁəz (classical Ethiopic) between 1300 and the present. The grant programs are under the direction of Wendy Belcher, a professor of comparative literature and African American studies at Princeton.
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, a historically Black educational institution in East Greensboro, was awarded nearly $1.8 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to research novel ways to capture carbon dioxide from the air. Debasish Kuila, a professor of chemistry in the College of Science and Technology, is the principal investigator.
