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.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology received a two-year, $1 million grant from California-based Hopper-Dean Foundation to support STEM programs that seek to increase ethnic and gender diversity in the computer science field. The Codelt program seeks to increase interest in computer science among girls in grades 6 through 8. The Women’s Technology Program is aimed at giving high schools girls hands-on experience in computer science with faculty mentors.

The University of Kansas received a three-year, $750,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to fund the Heartland Sexual Assault Policies and Prevention in Campuses Project. The program, under the direction of Alesha Doan, an associate professor of political science at the University of Kansas, will assistant colleges and universities in Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska institute programs to prevent campus sexual assaults.

Simmons College, the women’s college in Boston, received two grants from Collaborative Research Experiences for Undergraduates that will fund research in brain-computer interfaces and to improve computer recognition of human speech patterns.

Mills College, the liberal arts educational institution for women in Oakland, California, received a five-year, $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to continue an 18-year-old program that aims to motivate and prepare low-income students from Oakland high schools for college. Students in the program attend monthly seminars on study skills, college preparation, goal setting, financial aid opportunities, and career counseling. The Mills Educational Talent Search program is led by Mayra Guevara.

Texas Woman’s University received a $373,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to conduct research on slowing down the progression of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The National Institutes of Health estimates that more than 6 million Americans suffer from these diseases and the number is expected to grow rapidly as the Baby Boomer generation gets older.

The Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire received a three-year, $2 million grant from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute that will study how women make decisions on their care following a diagnosis of breast cancer. The study will include 1,000 women recruited from four major cancer centers. These women will be given two decision-aid tools to help them decide how to proceed. Researchers hope to show that the use of these decision aids will lessen women’s anxiety about their decisions, result in less regret over the decisions they have made, and lead to a higher quality of life after treatment begins.

The project is under the direction of Marie-Anne Durand, an assistant professor of health policy and clinical practice at Dartmouth. She holds a bachelor’s degree and two master’s degrees in clinical psychology from the University Pierre Mendes-France in Grenoble, France. She earned a Ph.D. in medicine and health psychology from Cardiff University in Wales.