GREENSBORO, N.C. (WGHP) – The protection of the planet through the development of clean energy will be explored more deeply at North Carolina A&T State University.

The university’s College of Engineering has received a federal grant of $10.35 million to research how to separate hydrogen and oxygen from water to create clean energy, a release from NC A&T announced.

The grant – at least the third major investment for energy and technology received this year by A&T – is part of $420 million the Department of Energy awarded for its Energy Frontier Research Centers, which are created to study future energy development and move toward the goal of having a zero-emission economy by 2050.

A&T’s piece is to open, under the direction of professor Dhananjay Kumar, the Center for Electrochemical Dynamics and Reactions on Surfaces – the acronym is CEDARS – where the hydrogen initiative will play out during this 4-year grant.

And the school is in elite company. There were 43 grants awarded by the DOE, and nine of them went to laboratories, such as the famed Oak Ridge and Los Alamos labs.

A&T is also the only Historically Black College and University, the only college in North Carolina and one of only five in the South – Arkansas, Clemson, Florida and Georgia Tech are the others – on a list that includes MIT, Stanford, Cornell, Columbia, Princeton, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins and many other large and renowned universities.

“This is a crown jewel award from DOE that has never been awarded to an HBCU until now,” Kumar said in the release. “Not only will we be working on clean energy initiatives, we will also be involved in enhancing diversity, inclusion and equity by involving high school, undergraduate and graduate students from historically underserved backgrounds in our research.”

The DOE lists Kumar as “principal investigator,” but he will have a team of researchers that includes Kristen Rhinehardt of the Computational Science and Engineering department; Bishnu Bastakoti of the College of Science and Technology, Chemistry; Shyam Aravamudhan of the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering; and Caroline Booth of the College of Education.