OUR STORY
Alabama State University’s 153-year history is a legacy of perseverance progress and promise. The ASU movement began with the impetus to establish a school for black Alabamians. The Civil War resulted in not only the end of slavery, but also in the opportunity for blacks to have the right to education. With the Northern victory, black Southerners, with the assistance of Northern white missionaries and the leaders of African-American churches, set out to establish educational institutions for the freedmen. ASU was born in that movement. ASU is the global entity it is today because of the fortitude of nine freed slaves from Marion, Ala., who sought to build a school for African-Americans previously denied the right to an education. The foresight of these men, now remembered as the “Marion Nine,” created what is now known as Alabama State University.
Continuing in the tradition of perseverance, progress and promise under the current leadership, the University became a hotbed for discovery in science. ASU has been awarded more than $7.5 million in NSF grants since 2005. Thanks to the ASU Center for Nanobiotechnology Research, 70,000-square-foot state-of-the-art Life Sciences facility, enabling 15 collaborative partnerships with institutions in the U.S. and international collaborations with scientists and universities in countries such as Argentina, Armenia, China, Croatia, Ethiopia, India and United Kingdom to exchange research knowledge and train ASU graduates to compete globally.
In 2023, ASU opened the doors to THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED HEALTH TECHNOLOGY (a 501c3 public charity) where Academic, Corporate, Government and Private sectors can work together to advance scientific research and development by using the latest technologies and then actively manage the responsible commercialization of novel products and services in the areas of Healthcare, Agriculture, and Environment that can have real-world impact and benefit all communities.
The Institute and University faculty have access to what is probably the world’s most sophisticated and high-speed Genomic search engine and its bioinformatic applications powered by patented KBioBox© technology. The platform is so powerful that it can search entire genomes in under a minute and can search, in extreme cases, against millions of reference genomes in under an hour, a powerful tool for identifying species or discovering homologies within next generation sequencing data and is customizable to meet the needs of the most complex or sophisticated research project. The platform has been used by Biotech companies to aid in the discovery of new cancer treatments and vaccines. It has also provided “technology assist” for numerous academic research projects leading to NIH publications.
It is the institute’s purpose to work with other Institutes, corporations and Universities in the the following areas, Gene Edit and off target Analysis. Sequence assembly analysis, Microbiome analysis, Cancer treatment via car T Cell analysis, Bio Agriculture, Plant Design, Soil Biome analysis, Identification of shared genes, Identification of key protein differences.