Here is this week’s news of grants and gifts that may be of particular interest to women in higher education.
Melissa Sutherland, a professor of nursing at Binghamton University, and Katherine Hutchinson, a professor at the University of Rhode Island College of Nursing have received a four-year, $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to study how to effectively implement intimate partner and sexual violence screenings in college health centers across the United States. The study will include surveys with a national sample of 1,900 college health care providers from more than 300 colleges and in-depth interviews with a subsample of participants. Online focus groups and brief surveys will also be conducted with female college students to identify potential student reactions to violence screening.
Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, received a three-year, $296,000 grant from the Office on Violence Against Women of the U.S. Department of Justice. Stetson’s Wellness and Recreation Department is managing the grant and will be teaming up with the DeLand Police Department and Volusia Rape Crisis Center to create a community collaborative response to enhance victim services, implement education and prevention programs, and strengthen campus security and investigation strategies in order to avert, prosecute and respond to dating and domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking. The grant program is being led by Colleen Vanderlip, director of the university’s Wellness and Recreation Department.
The University of Illinois at Chicago received a three-year, $894,400 grant from the National Institutes of Health. Researchers, led by Sarah Ullman, a professor of criminology, law, and justice at the university, will collect survey and interview data from Chicago metropolitan area women and will provide important information for developing social support interventions that improve the functioning of both victims and informal supporters, such as friends, family, or intimate partners, to whom most victims disclose sexual assault. Information gathered from the study will help inform and serve as the basis for developing support network interventions for rape victims and their informal support providers.