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 $399,890 grant from the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program of the Institute of Museum and Library Services for a project to build a curriculum for school librarians to teach students the dangers of online misinformation, how to detect it, and avoid it. Tara Zimmerman, an assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Science, will conduct pilot programs in Texas, Oklahoma, and New York, to assess young children’s ability to distinguish between trustworthy and untrustworthy information online and how K-5 librarians are currently addressing misinformation with their students. From her findings, she will develop a curriculum to address information literacy. Dr. Zimmerman earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism at the University of Arkansas. After working in marketing, she earned a master of library and information sciences degree at the University of Oklahoma and a Ph.D. in information science from the University of North Texas.
Michigan State University has been awarded a partnership grant from the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE program that will work to build equitable and inclusive work cultures for women in STEM by focusing on both women from racial minority groups and gender expansive/ nonbinary faculty who are at higher risk of leaving academic STEM departments. Wayne State University in Detroit and Ohio State University will also participate in the five-year, $1.2 million grant program. The project centers on creating and implementing guidelines that will help attract, retain, and advance women in STEM. Its focus is on work that contributes to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice within STEM disciplines; providing support across the faculty lifecycle with equitable workload allocation; leadership development to create more active and engaged supporters for women and racial minority groups in STEM. Project findings will be compiled into a toolkit that can be implemented at research universities across the United States.
Temple University in Philadelaphia received a $754,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a web-based app to improve HIV prevention and substance use treatment access for incarcerated women in Philadelphia. The research will be under the direction of Sarah Bauerle Bass, professor of public health in social and behavioral sciences and director of the Risk Communication Laboratory. The first year of the project will be dedicated to getting feedback about barriers to gaining access to and staying on this kind of medication from women who have been incarcerated and may be at risk of HIV or overdose. In the second year, with help from Pittsburgh-based software company NuRelm, the app will be developed, and concept testing and usability testing will be done. In the third and final year of the grant, the researchers will pilot the intervention. Dr. Bass is a graduate of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she majored in communication. She holds a master of public health degree and a Ph.D. in health studies from Temple University.