Here is this week’s news of grants and gifts that may be of particular interest to women in higher education.
Bertha Hidalgo, an associate professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has received a two-year grant of more than $300,000 from Research Goes Red, an initiative by the American Heart Association Institute for Precision Cardiovascular Medicine. The grant is aimed at increasing education and awareness in women about cardiovascular disease and stroke. The goal is to provide evidence-based information about the types of messages that resonate best with women and encourage them to change behaviors to become more heart-aware and heart-healthy.
Elizabeth City State Univerity in North Carolina, received a $125,000 grant from the Governor’s Crime Commission to support efforts to create a resource center to better educate the campus on issues surrounding sexual violence. The grant will assist the university in creating a resource center that will provide a safe haven for victims, a victim advocate, identify resources on and off campus, and court assistance.
The University of Central Florida‘s College of Medicine’ received a $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to conduct a study to identify modifiable protective factors that may reduce risk of suicide among young lesbian and bisexual women. Through online surveys and individual interviews, the researchers hope to uncover what experiences the women have at key transitional moments in their lives – such as entering high school or college or starting a new job – that are associated with or protect them from considering suicide. Lindsay Taliaferro, an assistant professor of medicine is the co-leader of the project.
Six universities are sharing $21 million in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health to study racial and ethnic disparities in pregnancy-related complications and deaths. Black women under 20 are 1.5 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than are White women in the same age group, but Black women ages 30-34 are 4.3 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than are White women ages 30-34. The universities participating in the research are Tufts University in Massachusetts, the University of South Carolina, the University of Pennsylvania, Emory University in Atlanta, Michigan State University, and the University of Pittsburgh.