JBHE: Latest News for 6/9/11

Grants and Gifts

• The Medical College of Wisconsin received a five-year, $5.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop new HIV prevention programs for African-American men who have sex with men.

• The University of California at Riverside received a $156,417 grant from the state university system for a program aiming to increase the number of African-American students in the university’s graduate programs. For the next three summers, six students from historically black colleges and universities will spend eight weeks on campus gaining graduate research experience. They will be mentored by UC Riverside faculty. Participants will receive travel expenses, room and board, and a $3,000 stipend.

The grant program is under the direction of assistant professor Erica Edwards (above), who holds a Ph.D. from Duke University.

• Morgan State University, the historically black educational institution in Baltimore, received a $520,497 research grant from the U.S. Department of Defense. The research, under the direction of Angela Winstead, an associate professor of chemistry at the university, will seek to develop sensitive probes that troops can use for pathogen detection.

• The University of Southern California received a five-year, $1.8 million grant from the Minority Business Development Agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The grant will support the university’s Minority Business Development Agency Business Center on campus. The center offers business consulting services to minority entrepreneurs in Los Angeles.

• Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York, received a three-year, $450,000 grant from the New York State Department of Education. The grant will support the dual enrollment program of the college and the Medgar Evers College Preparatory High School.

About 86 percent of the students at the college, part of the City University of New York system, are black.

• The historically black University of Maryland Eastern Shore received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education to fund the Foreign Language Instructional Center on campus. Previously, the university offered foreign language programs only in French and Spanish. But the new center will teach classes in Arabic, Chinese, and Haitian Creole. In the future, the center hopes to add studies in Russian, Hindi, Swahili, and several other African languages.