Grants or Gifts Relating to Women in Higher Education

Here is this week’s news of grants and gifts that may be of particular interest to women in higher education.

Bryn Mawr College, the highly rated liberal arts institution in Pennsylvania, received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to plan and produce a pilot project for an online portal to archival resources pertaining to the higher education of women in the United States.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is the leader of the Anorexia Nervosa Genetics Initiative sponsored by a grant from the Klarman Family Foundation of Boston. The project will collect DNA samples from women and men who have had eating disorders and a control group of individuals who have not suffered from eating disorders. The goal is to determine if there are genetic factors that contribute to the risk of developing eating disorders. While eating disorders can affect men or women, the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders estimates that women make up 85 to 90 percent of all cases of anorexia and bulimia.

The principal investigator on the project is Cynthia Bulk, Distinguished Professor of Eating Disorders and director of the Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Bulik is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of California at Berkeley.

Brown University received the inaugural Seleni Research Award for a study on the feasibility, safety, and efficacy of chronotherapy for women who suffer from anxiety or depression in the third trimester of pregnancy. Many women are reluctant to take medications during this period. Chronotherapy attempts to adjust sleeping and wake-up times to improve mood. The research is under the direction of Katherine Sharkey, an assistant professor of medicine at Brown. She completed a M.D./Ph.D. program at Rush University in Chicago.