JBHE: Latest News for 1/14/10

Grants and Gifts

• Historically black Hampton University in Virginia received a $10.2 million grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to continue a project that began in 2002 to study ice clouds that form at high altitudes at the Earth’s poles.

• Winston-Salem State University, the historically black educational institution in North Carolina, received a donation of $220,000 from the estate of the late Rachel E. Diggs Wilkinson. Half of the money will be used for an endowed scholarship program. The remainder of the gift will establish an endowment fund for the operation of the Diggs Gallery at the university, named after the donor’s brother, who was an art teacher at the university for 45 years.

Rachel E. Diggs Wilkinson was a 1933 graduate of Winston-Salem State University. Denied admission to the graduate program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she earned a master’s degree at Columbia University and a doctorate at New York University. She was a longtime professor at the City University of New York until her retirement in 1972.

• Indiana University of Pennsylvania received a $160,000 grant from the Heinz Endowment to establish a program to increase black enrollments on campus. The university will target public schools in black neighborhoods of Pittsburgh with an outreach program. High school students will be given assistance when applying to college. And the university will offer summer courses to students at these high schools in an effort to prepare them for college-level work.

• Florida International University received a five-year, $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for a study on racial disparities in AIDS survival in the state of Florida. Research has shown that 84 percent of whites diagnosed with AIDS/HIV are alive three years later compared to 79 percent of blacks.

• Florida A&M University in Tallahassee received a three-year, $750,000 grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for a program focused on environmental toxins in minority neighborhoods of the city of Jacksonville. The project, entitled the Jacksonville Racial and Ethnic Environmental Approaches to Community Health, will educate health officials and the general public about environmental contaminants in the city.