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 Vanderbilt University School of Nursing has received a $1.43 million grant from the United States Health Resources and Services Administration to develop and implement a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) education program for emergency nurse practitioner students. According to principal investigator Mavis Schorn, “Currently there are just over 800 sites in the country that provide SANE services, yet nationally one in six women and one in 33 men will experience an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime.” The goal of the grant is to increase the number of well-trained nurses practicing in emergency departments in rural or underserved communities in the United States. According to Dr. Shorn, these areas experience more incidents of sexual assault than urban areas and have few or sometimes no examiners who can provide the care needed by victims.

The Duke Cancer Institute has received a $10.8 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to build a visual model of cancer tumors. The research team will develop a three-dimensional molecular characterization of pre-cancerous growths in the breast to better understand how breast cancers develop. Lead researcher Dr. Shelley Hwang stated, “We are excited about the opportunity to build on all the preliminary work that we have been doing to better understand ductal carcinoma in situ and other precancers.”

Ursuline College, an educational institution for women in Pepper Pike, Ohio, has been awarded a grant from the Modern Language Association for a professor to develop an English course based on the spirit, literature, and activitites of Cleveland’s Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, the only juried prize in the nation for books that confront racism and celebrate diversity. In the new course, which will be taught in the fall of 2019, students will read Anisfield-Wolf-recognized books, meet the authors who come to Cleveland for the annual awards ceremony, and enliven and contemporize the works through the digital humanities. This will involve using digital mapping platforms to analyze and contextualize the literature and creating a digital exhibit that will be available to the public.