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 University of Massachusetts at Lowell received a $50,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to conduct research on why women at historically Black colleges and universities choose to disclose or not to disclose incidents of sexual assaults to administrators at the educational institutions. The research will also examine if there are different health outcomes for women depending on whether or not they disclosed the fact that they were sexually assaulted.

The University of Alabama Birmingham received a grant from the National institutes of Health to expand a program where breast cancer survivors are paired with master gardeners from the Alabama Cooperative Extension System to promote nutritional health in an effort to reduce the risk for subsequent malignancies. The program is under the direction of Wendy Demark-Wahnefried, who holds the Webb Endowed Chair of Nutrition Sciences at the university and is the associate director for cancer prevention and control at the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center. Professor Demark-Wahnefried is a graduate of the University of Michigan. She holds a master’s degree in nutrition from Texas Woman’s University and a Ph.D. in nutritional science from Syracuse University in New York.

St. Catherine University, a leading women’s college in St. Paul, Minnesota, has received two grants totaling $6 million from the U.S. Department of Education. One grant will fund the establishment of the Experimental Learning Model Demonstration Center. The center will conduct research to examine best practices for increasing retention, graduation, and certification rates for students in interpreter programs for the deaf. The second grant is earmarked for increasing the diversity of certified interpreting specialists in behavioral health settings.

Syracuse University in New York received a three-year, $738,195 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to increase the number of women and students from underrepresented groups who pursue Ph.D. programs in chemistry. Nancy I. Totah, an associate professor of chemistry at the university is one of the leaders of the grant project. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University.

The University of Arizona received a four-year, $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a new method for the early detection of ovarian cancer. The project is under the direction of Jennifer Barton, a professor of biomedical engineering and interim director of the BIO5 Institute at the university. Professor Barton holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Irvine and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.