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 National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, has awarded a $4 million grant to support a collaboration between the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the North Carolina Diabetes Research Center. The grant will help to establish the North Carolina Consortium for Diversity Career Development in Nutrition, Obesity, and Diabetes Research. The consortium is a five-year collaboration that will be co-led by Elizabeth Mayer-Davis, the Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Nutrition and Medicine at the Gillings School, and Elimelda Moige Ongeri, professor and dean of the John R. and Kathy R. Hairston College of Health and Human Sciences at historically Black North Carolina A&T State University.
The University of Minnesota was awarded a four-year, $3.5 million grant from the U. S. Department of Education to establish National Resource Centers in International Studies and African studies. The grant will fund scholarships, enhance curricula in African studies, and fund library acquisitions.
The University of Pennsylvania received a grant from the Office of Women’s Health of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to expand its Heart Safe Motherhood system to monitor postpartum preeclampsia complications. The federal initiative seeks to identify, develop, and disseminate innovative methods to improve postpartum care for Black or African American and American Indian/Alaska Native women enrolled in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The Heart Safe Motherhood program gives new mothers a blood pressure cuff. They are prompted by the messaging system to report their readings twice daily for 10 days after leaving the hospital. Incoming readings are automatically analyzed based on a pre-programmed algorithm, and clinicians are immediately flagged when potentially dangerous increases in blood pressure are detected. The system is used in Penn Medicine hospitals and in several other pilot projects. The grant will allow the program to expand.
Historically Black Alabama State University received a $250,000 grant from the Alabama Department of Public Health to continue the university’s COVID-19 vaccination and testing efforts into the underserved Black Belt and other areas, while continuing programs on campus and in the city of Montgomery. The grant will fund a COVID support vehicle that will give the COVID response team more mobility as they extend vaccination and testing efforts into remote areas.
The University of Southern California is partnering with California State University, Los Angeles and historically Black Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science on a new $1.3 million, five-year training grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to create a first-of-its-kind program to enhance diversity in the next generation of addiction scientists. The program will train undergraduate students from underrepresented minority groups in the fields of alcohol and substance use disorders. The program is called Rising STARS (Scientific Training in Alcohol Research and other Substances).
