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This project is in response to the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Initiative under MBDA-OBD-2018-2005687. The intent is to develop a series of technical workshops and informational sessions with key DOD leaders as presenters and subject matter experts (SMEs), and faculty, students and minority business owners as participants and serve in an advisory capacity.  A team of engineering and business faculty from Howard University will lead this effort and serve as the organizers of all the events for small minority businesses and HBCUs in the Mid-Atlantic Region initially with the ultimate goal of disseminating this model to all HBCUs and minority businesses in the nation.  The HUPDD will address two of the objectives under the White House Initiative on HBCUs. They include:

  1. To allow HBCUs to compete for federal research and development funds;
  2. And to leverage partnerships with federal laboratories and/or technology related resources.

The approach will include:

  1.  Planning a series of technical workshops and information sessions about how to design and write effective grant applications for federal research and DOD contracts with the faculty, staff and students at the Mid-Atlantic HBCUs; and
  2.  Developing partnerships with HBCUs and small minority businesses. We expect these workshops to begin in fall 2018 with subject matter experts (SMEs) from the leading DOD agencies serving as key presenters. The proposed staff for the HUPPD have extensive connections with a large number of DOD agencies and federal laboratories. All of the planning for the technical workshops and informational sessions will be executed by the proposed HUPDD staff. It is anticipated that there will be on average two technical workshops or informational sessions per month  during the first six-months of the project.  These workshops will rotate from Howard University to other HBCUs serving as the hosts for some of these sessions.  The workshops will provide the kind of technical support in the form of forums, small-and-large groups, one-on-one advisory, technical writing sessions and assessments that the White House Initiative on HBCUs has not been able to provide to improve the competitiveness of HBCUs in their role as advocates in the past.

Faculty & Key Project Personnel

Dr. Sonya Smith, Principal Investigator

Professor of Mechanical Engineering

Lynne Kelly, Ph.D, Co- Principal Investigator

Associate Professor of Finance

Arlene P. Maclin, Ph.D, Program Manager

Senior Program Staff

Dr. Lenora Peters Gant

Technical Consultant