JBHE: Latest News for 11/5/09

Grants and Gifts

• Southern University, the historically black educational institution in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, received a $285,000 grant from the Institute of International Education. The university’s Navy ROTC program will use the grant to establish an African language and cultural immersion program and to fund study-abroad opportunities in Africa for Southern University students.

• Historically black Wilberforce University in Ohio received a six-year, $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The grant money will be used to support the university’s graduate program in rehabilitation counseling.

• Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York, received a $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for a program to ease the transition of biomedical science students from community colleges to four-year institutions. Blacks are 86 percent of the student body at Medgar Evers College.

• Georgia State University won a three-year, $675,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for its Center for Leadership in Disability. The center will work in conjunction with the historically black Morehouse School of Medicine to develop a program to reduce disparities in health related to disabilities and minority status.

• Delaware State University, the historically black educational institution in Dover, received a five-year, $5 million grant from NASA. The research will include six primary projects including using lasers to navigate in space and to detect life in extreme environments.

• Naa Oyo A. Kwate, assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how racism affects the health of African Americans.

• Xavier University, the historically black educational institution in New Orleans, received a five-year, $10.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to promote cancer research at the university.

• The University of South Carolina has been awarded funding from the Humanities Council of South Carolina to hold a conference next March, whose topic is, “The University of South Carolina and African-American Research in the Twenty-First Century.” The keynote speaker will be Henrie Monteith Treadwell of the Morehouse School of Medicine.