Texas Tidbits

Posted: 4/13/06

Texas Tidbits

ETBU business students place in top 20 globally. Students from East Texas Baptist University’s Fred M. Hale School of Business who participated in the GLO-BUS strategic management simulation placed in the top 20 in an overall worldwide ranking. ETBU students operated a digital camera company in head-to-head competition against companies run by other schools. The team’s challenge was to craft and execute a competitive strategy that resulted in a respected brand image, kept their company in contention for global market leadership, and produced good financial performance as measured by earnings per share, return on investment, stock price appreciation and credit rating.

Baylor Horizons project gets Lilly grant. Baylor Horizons, a university project designed to help students, faculty and staff explore the relationship between faith and vocation, has received a $500,000 grant from Lilly Endowment as a follow-up to an earlier $2 million grant in 2000. With matching funds Baylor will provide, the grant will total $1.1 million for the three-year project.

Baylor receives $2.9 million for lupus study. Baylor Research Institute recently received two grants totaling $2.9 million to study lupus, an autoimmune disease that affects more than 1 million people in the United States. Jacques Banchereau, director of the Baylor Institute for Immunology Research, received $1.9 million from the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases to study groups of immune system cells—called T cells—to see how they differ in lupus patients and healthy individuals. Virginia Pascual was awarded a $1 million research award from the Alliance for Lupus Research for a project that teams lupus clinicians from throughout North America to validate signatures—altered gene expression patterns—identified in the blood of lupus patients. Dallas-based Baylor Institute for Immunology Research is the immunology research component of Baylor Research Institute, an affiliate of Baylor Health Care System.

Buckner receives $1.5 million foundation grant. Buckner Children & Family Services has received a $1.5 million grant from the Christ is Our Salvation Foundation. The gift, which is being made over a three-year period, will support four programs that provide hands-on volunteer opportunities—new church and community ministry collaborations with churches, humanitarian aid along the Texas/Mexico border, the Kids Hope USA mentoring program for at-risk children and ongoing Buckner ministries in the Vickery Meadows area of Dallas.

Grant to Baylor social work school funds study. Diana Garland, dean of Baylor University’s School of Social Work, and Jon Singletary, director of the school’s Center for Family and Community Ministries, have received two grants totaling more than $76,000 to conduct the first major national study in 20 years of congregation-based early childhood education and family support. The Louisville Institute, a Lilly Endowment program for the study of American religion, has committed $40,896. The A.L. Mailman Family Foundation, which funds projects to improve early childhood education and the well-being of young children and their families, has committed an additional $35,000 to conduct this yearlong research project. This research will be the first step toward developing resources and training to help congregation leaders and early childhood educators, Garland said. The final report, expected in June 2007, will be available on the Center for Family and Community Ministries website at www.family-ministry.org, and it will be followed by publications and workshops for early childhood educators in congregations, she noted.