Morgan State University's School of Engineering has received a $6 million, five-year grant from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to establish a research center that will provide space missions with a technology base for the production of microwave components and systems, the university announced this week.

Called the Center for Advanced Microwave Research and Applications, the program is part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's effort to encourage competitive aerospace research and technological capability among historically black colleges and universities, Morgan officials said. Morgan joins 13 other colleges that receive research funding from the space agency.

"This is probably one of the largest grants [the School of Engineering has] received," said Carl White, the Morgan engineering professor who will direct the center. "The purpose of the center is twofold: to produce African-American Ph.Ds and provide a technology base of microwave components to be transferred to NASA and other commercial entities."

The research grant is the first awarded to Morgan by NASA. But it is a continuation of a relationship between the space agency and Morgan's School of Engineering that dates to 1985, university officials said.

The center will develop microwave components to be used in transmitters and receivers and climate prediction equipment, among other kinds of systems, White said. The center will include two co-directors from the engineering school in addition to White, and will rely on the research of about 50 undergraduate engineering students, six master's students and seven doctoral students.

White said he is also in the process of arranging partnerships between the center and Northrop Grumman Corp. and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

Morgan, long known for its strong engineering program, is among the top producers of African-American electrical engineers in the country, and last spring its first engineering doctoral student graduated.