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.

Columbia College, a liberal arts college for women in South Carolina, received a $100,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for changes to the curriculum to incorporate the liberal arts into core courses.

The University of Houston received a two-year, $500,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to establish the Latina Maternal and Family Health Center in the Graduate School of Social Work. The center will conduct research on methods to lower the rate of postpartum depression among Latinas. The grant project is under the direction of McClain Sampson, an assistant professor in the College of Social Work. Dr. Sampson is a graduate of the University of Colorado, where she majored in psychology. She holds a master of social work degree from the University of Tennessee and a Ph.D. in social work from the University of Texas at Austin.

The University of Alabama Birmingham received a $700,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to support its work in the Global Network for Women’s and Children’s Health Research. The program seeks to improve maternal and infant health outcomes in resource-poor settings.

Drs. Misra and Murray-Close

The University of Massachusetts received a grant from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth to study how parenthood contributes to the gender wage gap. The research will be under the direction of Joya Misra, a professor of sociology and public policy, and Marta Murray-Close, an assistant professor of economics at the university. Dr. Misra, who holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Emory University in Atlanta, joined the faculty at the university in 1999. Dr. Murray-Close, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan, joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts in 2011.

Georgia State University in Atlanta received a five-year, $3.2 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to conduct research on gender differences in the neurochemcial mechanisms underlying social stress.

The University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis received a two-year, $100,000 grant from the National Cancer Institute to study basal-like breast cancer, an unusually aggressive type of breast cancer. The research will be under the direction of Meiyun Fan, an associate professor of pathology at the Health Science Center.