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Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black educational institution in Texas, has established a new partnership centered on an undergraduate certificate program called Peace Corps Prep. Students in the Peace Corps Prep program will combine targeted coursework with hands-on experience, building the competencies needed to be strong Peace Corps volunteers or other intercultural fieldworkers.
Peace Corps Prep will be structured as an interdisciplinary certificate program housed in PVAMU’s Office of International Programs. Through a combination of coursework and hands-on experience, students will develop four core competencies that are critical to intercultural fieldwork: foreign language proficiency, intercultural competence, professional and leadership development, and sector-specific skills in one of Peace Corps’ six sectors.
“Prairie View A&M University is pleased to partner with the Peace Corps, as the collaboration will help us advance an important aspect of our mission, which seeks to invest in programs and services that address issues and challenges affecting the diverse ethnic and socioeconomic population of Texas and the larger society including the global arena,” said Godlove Fonjweng, executive director of international programs at the university, who will also serve as the Peace Corps Prep coordinator. “The Peace Corps Prep program offers our students the opportunity to hone the skills they will need to be successful in the international arena, either as Peace Corps volunteers or serving the global community in other capacities.”
Historically Black Prairie View A&M University has been selected by the U.S. Department of Transportation to lead a historic national-tier University Transportation Center. Joined by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, and Texas A&M University, Prairie View University will lead the National Center for Infrastructure Transformation, which will focus on enhancing the durability and extending the life of the nation’s infrastructure.
The National Center for Infrastructure Transformation will receive $4 million per year for five years and is one of only five awarded national-tier centers. With strong capabilities to address the infrastructure issues of both urban and rural areas across all transportation modes, the work of this innovative center will improve durability and resilience across the country for years to come.
“Prairie View is the first HBCU to lead a national UTC, and we are proud to bring this to Texas, particularly when the national centers have historically been on the East and West coasts,” said John Sharp, chancellor of the Texas A&M University System. “This is what can be accomplished when we combine the research expertise of one of our universities with the resources of the A&M System, and this team will achieve a great result for the state of Texas and the nation.”
“I am delighted that this award has put Prairie View A&M University’s long-held transportation research expertise on the national stage,” said Judy Perkins, a professor of civil and environmental engineering who will serve as the center’s director. “Prairie View A&M University’s leadership, expertise, and spirit of innovation will, as the center’s name suggests, work to transform our nation’s infrastructure over the next five years and beyond.”
Dr. Perkins joined the faculty at Prairie View A&M University in 2004 after teaching at North Carolina A&T State University, the University of New Orleans, and Southern University in Baton Rouge. Professor Perkins is a graduate of Southern University. She holds a master’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Michael L. McFrazier was named acting president of Prairie View A&M University. His tenure will be a short one. He is taking over for Ruth Simmons who stepped down three months earlier than planned due to a dispute with the university system. (See JBHE post.) Dr. Simmons will join Rice University in Houston as a President’s Distinguished Fellow, effective April 1.
Dr. McFrazier will serve as acting president for three months until Tomikia P. LeGrande, the current vice provost for strategic enrollment management at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, will become president of Prairie View A&M on June 1. (See JBHE post.)
“Prairie View A&M University has an established legacy of achieving excellence in teaching, research, and service, and I will work assiduously to continue that legacy,” Dr. McFrazier said. “The importance of this job is humbling, and I am indeed honored to have been asked to serve.”
Since 2020, Dr. McFrazier has been dean of Prairie View A&M University’s Whitlowe R. Green College of Education. Dr. McFrazier began his professional career as a public school teacher and administrator in the Waco Independent School District. He joined the faculty at Prairie View A&M in 1998. Over the years, he has served as coordinator of the educational administration degree program, coordinator of the doctoral program in educational leadership, associate provost and associate vice president for academic affairs, vice provost for academic affairs and dean of the Northwest Houston Campus, and vice president for administration.
Professor McFrazier holds a bachelor’s degree in music education and two master’s degrees from Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He earned a doctorate in educational administration at the University of Arkansas.
Historically Black Prairie View A&M University is now offering bachelor’s degree programs in public health. It is the first HBCU in Texas to offer such degrees.
The bachelor of science degree curriculum is designed for students interested in pursuing a career as a public health professional and/or a graduate program in public health. The bachelor of arts program is for those interested in seeking admission into professional schools, such as medical school, dental school, or physician assistant programs with an interest in public health.
“Reducing health disparities is one of the major goals of public health,” said Alphonso Keaton, dean of the Office for Undergraduate Studies and an associate professor of biology at the university. “Thus, as an HBCU, it is incumbent upon PVAMU to produce highly trained public health professionals with the core competencies in public health to develop and implement strategies to address the fundamental environment, social and economic causes of health inequities in Texas, the country, and globally.”
Dr. Keaton added that “unfortunately, in the US, we continue to suffer from racial disparities in health care, despite significant advances in modern health care. Some of the statistics are staggering, and even surprising for a developed nation.”
At a time when Blacks face such disparities in health and in society, Dr. Keaton says PVAMU has a calling and a responsibility as a historically Black university “to educate students who derive from underrepresented communities and to help bridge the gaps in these health disparities.”
Dr. Keaton holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology from Fisk University in Nashville. He earned a Ph.D. in physiology from Meharry Medical College in Nashville.
Here is this week’s news of grants or gifts to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.
Historically Black Tennessee State University has received a grant of nearly $5 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for sustainable hemp fiber research that will promote market development of industrial hemp supply as a climate-smart commodity through incentives to underserved Tennessee growers enrolled in the program. The funds will be used to provide support and incentives to historically underserved farmers owning up to 500 acres to grow fiber hemp. The fiber hemp will then be processed and supplied to the motor vehicle industry as raw materials for manufacturing critical motor vehicle parts such as fabrics and bioplastics The project is being led by Emmanuel Omondi, assistant professor of agronomy at Tennessee State. Dr. Omondi is a graduate of the University of Nairobi in Kenya. He holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in agronomy from the University of Wyoming.
African Americans are more likely to be living with HIV than other racial and ethnic groups. One of the significant factors related to HIV disease management is smoking status, as smoking negatively impacts HIV treatment, and people with HIV are more likely to smoke relative to the general population. The University of Houston received a $1.3 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse for the development of a mobile intervention for Black American smokers who are infected with HIV.
The Quantum Biology Laboratory at historically Black Howard University in Washington, D.C., received a $1 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Researchers in the lab will use the funding to build upon its previous work in modeling and measuring how quantum optical effects in cytoskeletal networks enable living matter to process information in ultrafast communication channels. The lab seeks answers to questions such as: How do living systems arise from nonliving matter? How does life organize from biomolecular building blocks? What is the role that light plays in the origins of life itself? The lab is under the direction of Philip Kurian, who holds a Ph.D.from Howard University.
Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, has received a $399,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a three-year applied learning research curricular project on voting rights. Bard College is collaborating on the project with three historically Black universities — North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Tuskegee University, and Prairie View A&M University – and the Andrew Goodman Foundation. The crux of the project will study how the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 and outlawed age-based voter discrimination, impacted voter disenfranchisement while also focusing on the role of college communities in the fight for voting rights.
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