Here is this week’s news of grants and gifts that may be of particular interest to women in higher education.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln received a five-year, $900,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop tools and resources to help women survivors of sexual assaults. Anna Jaffe, an assistant professor of psychology at Nebraska, is collaborating with Husker sorority members to develop a web-based, social network-driven tool that will help women support survivors of sexual assault in the long term — without alcohol. Dr. Jaffe is one of the first to explore how educating peers on the long-term support of sexual assault survivors may reduce alcohol use and alleviate survivors’ distress.
The University at Albany of the State University of New York System has received a three-year, $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation toward the project, called SAGES — Striving to Achieve Gender Equity in STEM. The initiative is focused on three major target areas:
- Proactive recruitment and unbiased hiring
- Creating a more positive departmental culture and
- Retaining faculty who are women and supporting their advancement through equitable policies and programs
Through a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Emory University in Atlanta is participating in a study evaluating immune responses to COVID-19 vaccines, when the vaccines are administered during pregnancy or within two months after delivery. The study will build on these studies by improving researchers’ understanding of antibody responses to COVID-19 vaccines among pregnant and postpartum people and the transfer of antibodies to their infants.
The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Human Genome Research Institute have awarded a team of Yale University researchers an $8 million grant for studying recurrent pregnancy loss. The research team hopes to identify genes and types of genetic variation that may be responsible in individuals who experience multiple miscarriages. Fifteen percent of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. Approximately 5 percent of women will experience two miscarriages, and about 1 percent of these women will have a third.