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.
Virginia Commonwealth University received a three-year, $3 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to establish the Translational Research Center in Lung Cancer Disparities on campus. The Medical University of South Carolina is a partner in the effort. Robert Winn, director and Lipman Chair in Oncology at the university’s Massey Cancer Center, senior associate dean for cancer innovation, and a professor of pulmonary disease and critical care medicine at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine is leading the grant project.
The Center for the Study of Religion and the City at historically Black Morgan State University in Baltimore received a $250,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. The grant will fund the Center’s “Good Life Project,” which seeks to learn from public wisdom through collaborative and life-giving community events in eight cities throughout the U.S., beginning with a recognition that a pre-pandemic “normal” was never an ideal for many Black and Brown communities.
The Emory University School of Law in Atlanta received a $5 million grant from the Southern Company. The grant will be used to establish the Center for Civil Rights and Social Justice. The newly established center will serve as a hub for interdisciplinary scholarship, research, teaching, evidence-based policy reform, and community outreach that improves the lives of individuals who have experienced violations of their civil rights and have been impacted by social injustice.
Historically Black Meharry Medical College’s School of Applied Computational Sciences in Nashville, Tennessee, has received a $671,411 grant from the National Science Foundation to create a high-performance computing network with two supercomputers. The grant will fund upgrades to Meharry’s existing ADA Departmental GPU supercomputer and the purchase of a Quartet Departmental Mainframe supercomputer. Also, the grant will provide three years of support for a system administrator and a consultant to maintain the high-performance network.
The Weitzman School of Design’s Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites at the University of Pennsylvania received a $750,000 grant from the Andrew W, Mellon Foundation. The grant will support the center’s Capacity Building for Sustainable Preservation of Civil Rights Heritage Places initiative, which focuses on giving incoming preservation professionals an understanding of the imbalances in determining which historic locations get preserved. The Robert R. Taylor School of Architecture and Construction Science and Management at historically Black Tuskegee University in Alabama will partner with the University of Pennsylvania on the project. Tuskegee also received $750,000 for the project.
