Tatum ’75 Receives Carnegie Award

Spelman College President Beverly Daniel Tatum ’75 was presented with a national academic leadership award from the Carnegie Corp. of New York in December 2013. She was the first recipient from a historically black college and the first ever in the state of Georgia.

Tatum was selected because of her work supporting female students pursuing  science, technology, engineering and math at the university.  More African-American women earned doctorates at Spelman in those fields between 1997 and 2006 than at Georgia Tech, Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill combined. Tatum was a psychology major at Wesleyan who went on to earn her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

With the award comes a $500,000 grant toward Tatum’s academic initiatives. She plans to use half to help establish an endowed computer science faculty position at the college and the other half to help create the President’s Safety Net Fund, to financially assist students in emergency situations who are nearing graduation.