Here is this week’s news of grants and gifts that may be of particular interest to women in higher education.
Several colleges and universities in the Patriot League are sharing a grant from the National Science Foundation for the Patriot League Institutions Mentor Associate Professor WISEly program that aims to provide professional mentoring to women who have recently been promoted to associate professor positions in STEM fields. Participating institutions are Lehigh University, Lafayette College, Georgetown University, Bucknell University, the United States Military Academy and the U.S. Naval Academy.
Kristen Jellison, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and a co-principal investigator on the grant program, states that “newly tenured faculty represent a group of professors who are generally neglected in terms of mentoring. The grant program will focus on emerging best practices for mentoring new women associate professors in STEM with respect to their impact on career satisfaction, professional success, and promotion.” Dr. Jellison is a graduate of Cornell University and holds a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from MIT.
The University of New Hampshire in Durham received a grant from the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation to develop a mobile phone app that will provide localized information for victims of sexual assault. The app, which can be used by students and staff at 23 colleges and universities in the state, uses geospatial technology to provide information on local crisis centers, hospitals, campus resources, and police.
Alabama State University in Montgomery received a five-year, $815,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to fund the university’s Maternal and Child Health Pipeline Training Program. The program trains healthcare workers to address health disparities for mothers and their children from traditionally underserved groups.
The University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis received a five-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for a research project entitled, “Maternal Genotype, Choline Intervention, and Epigenetics in Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.” The study will examine how the effects of alcohol consumption by pregnant women differ due to their genetic makeup. The research is under the direction of Kristin Hamre, an assistant professor in the department of anatomy and neurobiology. She holds a Ph.D. in anatomy from the University of Iowa.