The check is not the story. The story is what changed when the check arrived. Tuskegee University has entered the second phase of its National Human Genome Research Institute award for the Carver Genomic Research Center, and nearly $10 million from the National Institutes of Health now funds five years of full research operations in Macon County, Alabama.
Phase 1 built the machine. Phase 2 turns it on. The center, launched in 2024 at the university Booker T. Washington founded, will aim genomic science at the cancers that disproportionately affect Black communities across Alabama’s Black Belt, studying tumors in the population that actually gets them. Dr. Deepa Bedi, professor of physiology and director of the Center for Biomedical Research, says the center exists “to build genomic research capacity where there has been very little before.”
What Phase 2 Buys That Phase 1 Could Not
Anyone who has administered federal research money knows the two phases are different species. Infrastructure awards buy capability: high-performance computing, AI platforms, sequencing technology, training pipelines. Tuskegee spent Phase 1 on exactly that, and in August 2025 it broke ground on an 8,000-square-foot research annex to house the growing portfolio.
Operations money buys answers. It pays for the studies themselves, the scientists and students who run them, and the years of follow-through a serious research question requires. Dr. Tim Turner, Tuskegee’s vice president for research, puts the shift plainly: the tools built in Phase 1 are now being applied to cancer biology. Three projects open the portfolio. One investigates the genomic drivers of bladder cancer. A second studies triple-negative breast cancer in women of African ancestry, an aggressive form of the disease that strikes younger women and has rarely been studied in the women most at risk. A third uses machine learning to sharpen how pathologists read cancer slides, work that decides how fast and how accurately a diagnosis comes back.
Genomics in a Town That Has Reason to Ask Questions
Tuskegee does this work under a long shadow. Macon County is where the federal government ran its infamous syphilis study for forty years, and the university’s researchers do not pretend otherwise. The center works through three cores, and one of them belongs to the community: residents in Macon and Bullock counties meet researchers at town halls and community cafés, where the team explains what genomics is, how participant information is protected, and what the federal Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act covers. Trained community navigators who live in the region carry the conversation between meetings.
Bioethics has its own seat at the table. Dr. Stephen Sodeke, the center’s bioethicist, says that at Tuskegee “bioethics is not an afterthought,” but is built into consent, data stewardship, and every stage of the research. In most American genomics, trust is a recruitment problem to be managed. At Tuskegee it is the founding condition, and the center is structured as if the neighbors are partners, because they are.
The center’s name carries the argument. George Washington Carver built his laboratory at Tuskegee on the premise that science owed its first duty to the farmers outside the gate. A genomics center bearing his name, sequencing the cancers of the Black Belt, is that premise with better instruments.
A Strong Week for HBCU Research Money
Tuskegee’s award led a crowded week. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education’s latest grants roundup lists more than $26 million in new research and institutional funding across six HBCU items: Jackson State University received $7.5 million from the U.S. Department of War for defense-related infrastructure research, Alabama State University won $3 million from the National Science Foundation for its DREAM-STEM project, Southern University drew a $2.875 million commitment from CareSouth, Central State University received $1.7 million from the U.S. Department of Education, and Morehouse College took $1 million as part of an NSF award building shared remote laboratories with Stanford, Purdue, and Emerald Cloud Lab.
Sustained capital of this kind compounds. The Carver Genomic Research Center is that logic in laboratory form, backed by the National Human Genome Research Institute.
The annex rising on campus will house the work. The work itself is aimed closer to home: at the bladder cancers and breast cancers moving through Black Belt families now, in the one place in America that has the hardest-earned reasons to do this research carefully, and the strongest claim to do it at all.
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