COMMUNITY OUTREACH

Maroon Tutor Match and Homework Help Center Scholarship Fund 
Grant Amount Awarded: $35,000

There is a tremendous demand for after school academic support in our neighboring communities. We’ve created a model to effectively connect University of Chicago students to local K-12 students, through our Maroon Tutor Match program and Homework Help Centers. We are seeking funding from the Women’s Board to bolster our MTM Scholarship Fund and operational support for our Homework Help Centers in order for these projects to reach their full potential. Since 2016, Maroon Tutor Match has served over 2,000 families across Chicagoland, with 78% of students coming from the South Side community areas surrounding the University. Our Homework Help Centers, which launched in 2023, provide free weekly tutoring sessions for K-12 students. 

Southside Science Scholars
Grant Amount Awarded: $20,000

Located just 1.5 miles from UChicago, Dulles Elementary suffers from educational disparities: the school does not meet state-level proficiency in reading or math and serves disenfranchised low-income students. South Side Science Scholars (S4) strives to close these gaps. After school, Dulles third graders engage in science experiments and mentorship led by medical students, fostering STEM exposure. Since 2018, testimonials affirm its impact, as one parent said, “I believe this program will help her with science and educate her in many ways that will help her in the future.” S4 expanded to a four-year program in 2021, ensuring continuity until middle school. Women’s Board support sustains crucial STEM resources and community partnerships, enabling field trips and empowering growth and expansion.

ARTS AND CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS

The Renaissance Society Music Program
Grant Awarded: $25,000

The Renaissance Society’s concert series, always free and open to the public on the University of Chicago campus, is a core facet of the museum’s program, presenting several major concerts every  year. It has organized performances by important artists including Laurel Halo, Kali Malone, Claire Rousay, Sarah Davachi, Sarah Hennies, Kara-Lis Coverdale, Olivia Block. Our partnerships  include the University Chapels, Logan Center for the Arts, Lampo, Frequency Festival, and more.  A grant will help to secure our music series for one year, and would create possibilities for further engagement between artists and the campus community, including workshops, discussions, and studio visits with students and faculty.

Theaster Gates Exhibition – Unto Thee: An Account of a Decade of Care
Smart Museum of Art
Grant Awarded: $50,000

In the Fall of 2025, the Smart Museum of Art will open Theaster Gates: Unto Thee, a pathbreaking exhibition about internationally renowned artist Theaster Gates, professor in UChicago’s Department of Visual Arts. The first solo museum show of Gates’s work in his hometown of Chicago, the exhibition will originate from the Smart’s galleries, then ambitiously spread across campus, and include creative activations at cultural hubs on the South Side. The exhibition aspires to capture the bold ideas in Gates’s artistic practice and neighborhood collaborations, spotlighting the transformative role of art in the social and cultural life of our communities. The grant will be instrumental to the preparation, co-creation, and success of this exhibition.

Initiative to Support Local Data Journalism
Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation & Data Science Institute
Grant Awarded: $45,000

Investigative journalism increasingly involves digging into large data sets on topics such as housing, policing, elections, and climate. Analyzing this information in a rigorous, impactful way takes computational power and expertise — just as many newsrooms are strapped for resources and staff and are investing less in investigative journalism. The Mansueto Institute and the Data Science Institute are partnering to launch a Local Data Journalism initiative, bringing journalists together with data science faculty and students to work on critical stories affecting Chicago. A grant will help us staff the program’s inaugural year, and work towards scaling the program nationally in 2025.

ArtsPass: Cultural Engagement for Every UChicago Student
Arts + Public Life
Grant Amount Awarded: $17,250

Through ArtsPass, UChicago students receive free and discounted tickets for museums and performances throughout the city. Students take advantage of ArtsPass over 25,000 times an academic year. Unique to UChicago, ArtsPass Exclusives are behind-the-scenes adventures for students to attend arts events, accompanied by an expert guides. Participants meet artists, go backstage, take tours, ask questions, and expand their interdisciplinary education through in-depth cultural experiences together with their peers. As costs rise and budgets contract, a grant to support ArtsPass means we can continue to offer Exclusives through 2025 and provide free admission to museums across Chicago.

Celebrating 100 Years of the University’s Work in Egypt
Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC)
Grant Amount Awarded: $50,000 

Since November 1924, scholars and artists from UChicago have been working against time and other threats to document, publish, and conserve the written records and archaeological heritage of one of the world’s great ancient civilizations. In 2024 ISAC is celebrating the Centennial of the University’s first and longest-operating overseas project the Epigraphic Survey at Chicago House in Luxor, Egypt. The grant will underwrite the ISAC Museum’s Centennial special exhibition and in-depth publication on the Survey’s history and continuing work.

QUALITY OF STUDENT LIFE

Pathways to Publishing: Chicago Review
Grant Amount Awarded: $33,000

Chicago Review (CR) has published influential new writing since 1946. Run by PhD students, CR provides singular professional development opportunities for undergraduates, MAs, and PhDs. Our editors receive hands-on experience in literary publishing: organizing submissions, managing subscriptions, web development and social media, overseeing grant projects and donor base growth, copyediting, fact/quote checking, typesetting, and proofreading. We seek to expand our mentorship capacities by creating multiple new positions for the year 2024–2025. Beyond supporting CR, the new roles will prepare humanities graduate students for careers in publishing, journalism, media, writing, and fundraising.

Keeping the Signal Strong: Restoring WHPK’s Presence in the South Side
Grant Amount Awarded: $40,000

An organization of 100+ students, faculty, and Hyde Park community members, WHPK is a nonprofit radio station broadcasting to and programming events for the South Side for over fifty years. WHPK has been at the forefront of cultural expression, responsible for bringing budding local artists into the national spotlight. This past year, a 60% budget slash jeopardized post-covid upgrades of crucial, broken equipment and ended almost all live programming. Funding will support the replacement of our our 20-year-old audio processor and our 34-year-old transmitter, without which we cannot air.

GRAD Communication Lab
Grant Amount Awarded: $28,000

The GRAD Communication Lab, led by current staff at UChicagoGRAD, will give UChicago PhD students from all academic units the communication skills needed to (1) develop as scholars; (2) increase the impact of their research within and beyond academia; and (3) achieve their career goals in academia, industry, nonprofits, and government. The Lab will make writing training available to more than 3,000 PhD students while also integrating and expanding existing UChicagoGRAD services, including public speaking training, writing accountability groups, and experiential learning. These services can pay special dividends for first-generation, underrepresented, and multilingual students by giving them tools to develop sustainable writing practices and communicate effectively with mentors.

Student National Medical Association Minority Association of Premedical Students (SNMA-MAPS)
Grant Amount Awarded: $15,000

UChicago SNMA-MAPS is dedicated to empowering underrepresented minority students pursuing pre-medical, pre-dental, and pre-health careers. With this grant, we aim to amplify our impact. Our primary goal is to send UChicago MAPS members to AMEC, a vital national convention connecting black and brown medical professionals, students, and institutions. By facilitating networking opportunities, internships, and shadowing experiences, we aim to propel our students towards successful careers in medicine. Additionally, the grant will support various academic needs identified by our students, ensuring they have the resources necessary for a robust application process.

Women in Astrophysics: Increasing Representation and Retention
Grant Amount Awarded: $15,000

Women are consistently underrepresented in astrophysics, earning ~20% of degrees in physics and astronomy and comprising the same proportion of faculty. Despite numerous efforts aimed at girls in STEM, there are few efforts aimed at retention of women in the physical sciences. We propose a month-long series coinciding with Women’s History Month, which will engage current UChicago students and the larger Chicago community. The series will consist of multiple talks by inspiring women in astrophysics as well as a book, primarily authored by female physicists at UChicago, to serve as a primer on the field.

FACULTY RESEARCH & SUPPORT

MRI/Image-Guided Personalized Therapy for Breast Cancer
Department of Radiology, Biological Sciences Division
Grant Amount Awarded: $50,000

Current pre-surgical treatment to shrink or eliminate breast cancer is largely a one-size fits all approach.  Our goal is to identify patients who are highly likely to respond to treatment and can be treated with less aggressive therapy with reduced toxicity. In addition, we will identify patients who require more aggressive treatment.  We propose to develop MRI methods to predict response to pre-surgical therapy for breast cancer and guide individualized therapy for breast cancer patients. Women’s Board funding would allow us to incorporate new ideas and strengthen our proposals to the NIH, which will support rapid translation of these methods into clinical practice.

Childhood Asthma in Black American Families
Department of Pediatrics, Biological Sciences Division
Grant Amount Awarded: $46,800

Black children living in low resourced communities in the U.S. are five-times more likely than white children to develop asthma. This phenomenon appears to be largely influenced by exposure to race-related stressors during pregnancy, which leads to higher levels of fetal exposure to maternal inflammation. What if the rate of childhood asthma in Black children could be cut in half? We propose to test whether prenatal dietary supplementation with omega-3 fatty acids may decrease the risk for childhood asthma by reducing the amount of inflammation during pregnancy.

Improving Mental Health Care at UChicago Medicine by Establishing a Patient Advisory Board
Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, Biological Sciences Division
Grant Awarded: $40,000

Because of the nationwide shortage of mental health providers, the majority of mental health care is provided by primary care clinicians. However, primary care clinicians receive little mental health training. The Primary Care Behavioral Health Integration Program (PC-BHIP) is a multidisciplinary effort to bridge this gap. PC-BHIP develops clinical decision support systems so clinicians can screen, diagnose, and treat mental health problems without referring to psychiatry.  We are seeking funding to establish a formal BHIP Patient Advisory Board, which will allow us to apply for federal funding opportunities and accelerate our impact.

MuscleRecall: Enabling Muscle Memory While Learning with Muscle Stimulation
Department of Computer Science, Physical Sciences Division
Grant Awarded: $50,000

Learning a physical skill comes from repeating it over and over. Beginners require teachers’ feedback to ensure that the movement they are repeating is correct. However, teachers can only give this feedback  when they are present, and they cannot convey how the movement should feel. We have demonstrated how force-feedback devices (e.g., electrical-muscle-stimulation, exoskeletons) can move a user’s body automatically in a small device such as a wearable-glove that moves fingers, but there is no evidence that these devices lead to muscle memory. We seek to develop new wearable devices and measure their ability to expedite the learning of various movement-based tasks such as piano playing and drumming.

Metastatic Colorectal Cancer:  Investigating Novel Combination Therapies
Department of Cellular Oncology, Biological Sciences Division
Grant Amount Awarded: $40,000 

Metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) is a formidable challenge in oncology, especially among women. Most patients with mCRC receive systemic therapies, which prolong survival and improve symptoms but are typically not curative. Our prior work identified three molecular subtypes in patients with colorectal liver metastases, including a highly curable immune subtype in 25% of patients, thus shaping a new framework for prognosis and treatment personalization. This grant will support research that delves into the molecular mechanisms of immune pathways. Additionally, it will delineate novel strategies to augment immunotherapy responses, with the goal of enhancing treatment efficacy for women with mCRC.