Here is this week’s news of grants and gifts that may be of particular interest to women in higher education.
A team of researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch and Texas A&M University has received a $7.5 million grant from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. The funding will be used to establish a research center dedicated to studying women’s and pregnancy health. The initiative plans to utilize a new emerging technology – microphysiological systems – to replicate female reproductive organs and develop drugs to advance medical science in women’s health.
Spelman College, a women’s college in Atlanta, has received a $1 million grant from Google’s Cybersecurity Clinics Fund to establish the Spelman SPEAR (Security Plan, Education, Assessment, and Remediation). The program will provide students with hands-on learning opportunities in cybersecurity and AI through helping local businesses and organizations with their cybersecurity efforts.
The University of Tennessee Health Science Center has received a $1.58 million grant from Gilead Sciences, Inc., a California-based pharmaceutical company. The funds will support research into the sociocultural and structural factors that cause cancer disparities among Black women in the southern United States.
A collaborative project between scholars at West Virginia University, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Maine has received a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture to support self-employment and entrepreneurship among women and Black people in rural areas. Both groups significantly lag behind rural White men’s rate of entrepreneurship. The study aims to investigate why these disparities exist and help rural regions establish initiatives that facilitate successful entrepreneurship in their communities.