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.
Edward Waters University, a historically Black educational institution in Jacksonville, Florida, received a $1.7 million grant from the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration for programs to produce more certified addictions professionals and certified addictions counselors. The grant will provide tuition scholarships and cost-0f-living stipends for 26 students. The program is under the direction of Jacqueline Conley, a professor of psychology at the university. Dr. Conley holds a Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Howard University in Washington, D.C.
The department of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles has received a $500,000 grant from the nuclear physics program in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The grant will fund a pilot program designed to help low-income, first-generation, and historically underrepresented undergraduate students pursue graduate degrees and careers in nuclear physics, with the aim of increasing the diversity of scientists in this field. Students will join research groups at the university and will intern for 10 weeks during the summer at either Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory or Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Historically Black Albany State University in Georgia will receive $2 million in technology resources from International Business Machines. IBM is providing faculty training, pre-built and maintained curriculum content, hands-on labs, use cases, digital badges, and software. The university will bolster its curriculum by integrating these resources into related courses.
Five historically Black universities in North Carolina are sharing a three-year, $2 million grant from the PNC Foundation to support entrepreneurship programs at each school. The educational institutions receiving grants are North Carolina Central University, Fayetteville State University, Elizabeth City State University, Johnson C. Smith University, and Winston-Salem State University.
The College of Engineering, a joint program operated by Florida State University and historically Black Florida A&M University, received a $750,000, five-year grant from compressor manufacturer Danfoss Turbocor to fund scholarships and provide research opportunities for faculty and students. The grant will fund undergraduate fellowships for first- or second-year engineering students with a focus on first-generation college students or those who belong to an underrepresented group.
The Moorland- Spingarn Research Center at Howard University in Washington, D.C., received a $2 million grant from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation to support the preservation and digitization of the Black Press Archives, a newspaper collection of titles by Black journalists, editors, and publishers. The Black Press Archives represents more than 2,000 newspaper titles from the United States, Africa, and the African diaspora. It has 2,847 microfilm reels of newspapers, totaling over 100,000 individual issues of newspapers.
