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.
Historically Black Tuskegee University in Alabama received a $2 million grant from the Movember-Prostate Cancer Foundation to support cross-disciplinary pioneering research toward finding cures for prostate cancer. The project, “MET-PAAM: Elucidating the Molecular Mechanisms of Tumor Progression in Metastatic Prostate Cancer among Men of African Ancestry,” will map the landscape of genomic alterations in African American prostate cancers, which will enable the development of new precision medicine approaches. The project is under the direction of Clayton Yates, professor of biology and director of the Center for Biomedical Research at Tuskegee University.
Texas Southern University, the historically Black educational institution in Houston, received a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The grant money will be used to establish a Center of Excellence for research on affordable housing and economic developments intended to benefit low-income communities in urban areas.
Wayne State University in Detroit has been awarded $3,590,488 from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health to conduct a project titled “Stress and Cardiovascular Risk Among Urban African American Adults: A Multilevel, Mixed Methods Approach.” The project aims to provide a fine-grained characterization of the psychosocial factors associated with cardiovascular disease risk and inflammation among urban middle-aged and older African American adults.
Historically Black Florida A&M University received a two-year, $400,000 research grant to develop economic and climate models that capture short-term and long-term climate-change related impacts on U.S. agricultural production. The research will investigate the efficacy of adaptation strategies in minimizing those effects by combining computer-simulated data with real-world evidence of farmers’ adaptation behaviors using field data. Michée A. Lachaud, an assistant professor for the agribusiness program in the College of Agriculture and Food Sciences at Florida A&M University will direct the research.
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Michigan are sharing a five-year $3.2 million grant funded by the National Institute of Mental Health to conduct research to examine the impact of a multilevel intervention to reduce HIV stigma and improve treatment outcomes among adolescents in Uganda. The grant will provide training for education professionals — educators, school directors, teachers, and school nurses — which will occur concurrently with multiple family group interventions. Uganda has more than 170,000 adolescents living with HIV and HIV stigma continues to be a significant barrier to HIV treatment adherence.
Historically Black Howard University in Washington, D.C., announced a $5 million gift from Eddie C. Brown and C. Sylvia Brown to support the Graduation Retention Access to Continued Excellence (GRACE) program for students facing financial barriers. Eddie Brown is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Brown Capital Management, a Baltimore-based asset management firm that is the second oldest African-American-owned investment management firm in the world. This gift marks the largest alumni gift to Howard University in the school’s history.
