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The National Science Foundation (NSF) bragged on the success of FAMU's Center of Research Excellence in Science and Technology (CREST) in a recent edition of the U.S. News & World Report.

Back in 2006, NSF awarded FAMU a $5,165,603 five-year grant to establish CREST. CREST focuses on education and research in the field of astrophysics. A central objective of the center is to increase the number of African-Americans who earn PhDs in Astrophysics and Astrochemistry. The Center supports collaboration between the FAMU physics and chemistry departments and will facilitate the startup of a PhD program in Chemistry.

The principal investigator for CREST is Charles Weatherford (pictured), chairman of the FAMU Department of Physics.

FAMU's current CREST grant expires this year. But this positive article written by NSF's own staff shows that CREST probably has a good chance of being renewed. If this happens, it will be outstanding news for the Chemistry PhD development process.

From the article: "Center for Research Excellence Builds Competitiveness"

Few African Americans earn doctorates in physics. The class of 2007, for example, produced only 13 nationwide, according to the American Institute of Physics. Remarkably, five of them came from Florida A&M University (FAMU), whose program only began in 2001.


“There is an untapped pool of potential American talent, and we wanted to do something about it,” says Dr. Charles A. Weatherford, chairman of the university’s physics department and director of the university’s Center for Astrophysical Science and Technology, where students conduct much of their research. Moreover, FAMU is an Historically Black College or University (HBUC), one of 105 in the country, a designation that “does help to create a certain level of comfort from the start,” he adds.

“There is palpable expectation that the students are going to succeed,” Weatherford says. “This is the expectation of the students and the faculty alike. On a practical level, the faculty seldom has more than one Ph.D. student at a time, and thus there is a more concentrated interaction. Our faculty interacts with the students on a daily basis and the students are never allowed to stagnate.”

The university has produced ten Ph.D. physics graduates, eight of them African American, since its research-oriented degree program began, including nine during the period of the astrophysical science center. The center is among the National Science Foundation’s Centers of Research Excellence in Science and Technology (CREST), a program established 20 years ago to support research at minority-serving institutions in the United States.

The goal of CREST is to build the competitiveness of schools serving minorities, and to increase the recruitment and retention of diverse individuals in academic programs geared toward careers in science, math and technology. The FAMU center, now in its fifth year, receives about $1 million annually from NSF.

“We have been able to fully support our students in terms of tuition and stipends so that they typically do not have financial pressure,” Weatherford says.

Read the full article here at the U.S. News & World Report.