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.

Alverno College, a women’s college in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has received a $10 million gift from John and Tashia Morgridge to support the college’s strategic growth and advance innovation in its educational programming. The gift is one of the largest donations ever received in Alverno’s history.

Susan Voss, Achilles Professor of Engineering, at Smith College, an educational institution for women in Northampton, Massachusetts, has been awarded a $421,141 grant from the National Institutes of Health for her project, “Integrating data from a wideband acoustic immittance database to develop machine-learning models that characterize pathology in auditory measurements.”

The University of Connecticut has received an undisclosed gift from alumna Jeanine Armstrong Gouin to endow the Jeanine Armstrong Gouin Initiative for Women in Leadership in the university’s College of Engineering. The initiative aims to address the lack of women leaders in engineering fields through supporting educational and research programming for students, faculty, and alumnae. Gouin, who studied civil engineering at UConn, serves as president of the U.S. division of SLR International Corporation.

The School of Nursing at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, has received a $1.5 million grant to expand its sexual assault nurse examiner education program. In addition to educating Vanderbilt students, the program will now aim to recruit and train practicing nurses through continuing education credits. Additionally, the grant will allow the program to expand its partnership with professional organizations, many of whom are in underserved areas. The grant project will be oversee by Jennifer Wilbeck, professor and director of the emergency nurse practitioner specialty.