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 University of Alabama at Birmingham is the lead institution in a five-year, $12.5 million grant project funded by the National Science Foundation to better understand aging differences between women and men. The research aims to develop predictive models through novel analysis tools and hundreds of matched datasets profiling gene expression to determine how genome architecture, organismal biology, and phenotypic plasticity generate differences in aging. Other universities participating in the grant program are Marquette University, Brown University, Cornell University, Michigan State University, the University of Houston, the University of Kansas, and the University of Maryland. The principal investigator is Nicole Riddle, an associate professor of biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Riddle is a graduate of the University of Missouri. She earned a Ph.D. in evolutionary and population biology from Washington University in St. Louis.

Spelman College, the liberal arts educational institution for women in Atlanta, received a $5 million grant from Google. The grant will fund the Center of Excellence for Minority Women in STEM’s effort to support the development of a comprehensive data dashboard that will help shape the narrative of the impact of Black women leading, working, and studying in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. Google engineers, product managers, UX researchers, and designers will work with Spelman on a full-time, pro bono basis to help build the data dashboard.

The Gender and Sexuality Resource Center at Georgia State University has received a $100,000 gift from Georgia State alumnus and former associate vice president for student affairs and dean of students Darryl Holloman. The gift will help fund the center’s cultural and community-based programming that supports those identifying as LGBTQIA+ and fosters a more inclusive campus. It will also establish an endowed an award named after Bayard Rustin and Pauli Murray, early champions of LGBTQIA+ equality.

The Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa was awared a $289,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for a study to find out why male researchers are published more often than women researchers. The scholars seek to find out if women’s extensive mentoring of other women negatively impacts their scholarly output.