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 School of Engineering at historically Black Morgan State University in Baltimore is spearheading an initiative aimed at increasing interest and participation in Navy STEM educational programs among Baltimore-area youth through a $446,000 grant awarded by the Office of Naval Research’s Aerospace Science Research Division. The four-year grant will provide critical STEM programming, access to resources, faculty research opportunities, and student enrichment activities from K-12 through college. The grant is under the direction of Oscar Barton Jr., dean of the Clarence M. Mitchell School of Engineering at Morgan State.
Historically Black Xavier University of Louisiana received a $500,000 grant from Louisiana Healthcare Connections to fund a program centered on eliminating health disparities to create a more inclusive, representative healthcare system. To impact equity in health outcomes, Xavier University will leverage Louisiana Healthcare Connections’ health data for academic research and pilot projects focused on health disparities such as maternal health, hypertension, and diabetes.
A team of researchers in the department of psychology at Tufts University in Massachusetts is focusing on stress caused by racism, tracking its neurological and other physiological pathways to ill health, with a five-year, $2.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. For the study, the researchers will recruit people who identify as Black, and in controlled experiments will have them recall specific instances in which they experienced racial discrimination in any form, measuring a variety of physiological states, while controlling for the effects of other health behaviors. This protocol for examining bodily changes in response to recalling memories has been used by many other researchers to study emotion.
Historically Black Delaware State University received a $1,060,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to develop a Delaware Special Educator Certificate Program. The program is designed to offer master-degree level courses that will enable more teachers to obtain Special Education Certification, and more importantly reduce the shortage of special education teachers in the state. As of the summer 2023, there were 165 vacant special education teaching positions in the State of Delaware.
