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.

Texas Woman’s University received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation for research on methods to rehabilitate farmland by planting crops that not only grow in depleted soil but also contribute to the regeneration of that exhausted earth. The research is under the direction of Catalina Pislariu, an assistant professor of biology at the university. Dr. Pislarlu earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Bucharest in Romania. She holds a master of pharmaceutical sciences degree from Ghent University in Belgium and a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of North Texas.

Bennett College, a liberal arts educational institution for women in Greensboro, North Carolina, announced that The Rolling Jubilee Fund and the Debt Collective were wiping clean the debt owed to the college of all 462 graduates. All told, those debts were worth $1.7 million. The loan forgiveness applied only to money owed to the college, not federal student loans.

The women’s volleyball program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro received a $1.6 million donation from James Dutton, a fan of the program who grew up near the campus and took classes at the university. Most of the money will be used to establish the James Dutton Endowed Scholarships in Volleyball, providing two full-cost-of-attendance scholarships annually for members of the women’s volleyball team.

Texas Southern University in Houston is now providing breast cancer screening, among other services, for African American and other ethnic minority women in several nearby counties, as part of a $1 million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. The funds also provide evidence-based culturally appropriate breast cancer awareness and education services for a population that has traditionally been underserved and at higher risk for breast cancer.