Nearly 30 years ago, renowned immunologist James E.K. Hildreth, M.D., Ph.D., was compelled to start researching the virus that causes AIDS. He marveled at its enigma and was pressed into action by its ability to cut lives short and devastate communities. The disease set him on a course of medical inquiry that has included biomedical breakthroughs…

With local lumber mills shutting down, Robert Kenning, an instructor at Salish Kootenai College in western Montana, and the tribe's forestry director, came up with an idea. Kenning landed a $200,000 Department of Agriculture grant in 2010 to explore the possibility of turning logging scraps and smaller trees into chips or pellets that could be…

This article describes how Wayne State University's TechTown is helping revive Detroit's hard-hit economy. TechTown got its start when then-Wayne State President Irvin Reid and a small group of business leaders in the city and state officials decided Detroit needed to embrace the business incubator idea that had been so successful in other regions…

Historically Black colleges or universities (HBCUs) have long struggled to compete with traditionally White institutions (TWIs) when it comes to breakthrough research. Of the 908 U.S. institutions that received National Science Foundation research funding in fiscal year 2005, only 72 were historically Black, and they took in $294.2 million in…

In this article, the author describes the Science Diversity Center (SDC), a Web-based portal that has consolidated information on all the federal research funding targeted to faculty members at minority-serving institutions, or MSIs. Developed with backing from the National Science Foundation, the SDC has been unofficially up and running since…