The Institute is home to a number of important research projects. They are:

African AIDS Initiative International, Inc., Elleni Gebreamlak West, Executive Director

American Inequality Lab, Roland G. Fryer, Jr., Director

African American Lives, Genealogy and Genetics Curriculum Project, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Director

African American National Biography Project, General Editors: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

African Art Database, Professor Suzanne Preston Blier, Director

Bamun Art Worlds: Integration and Innovation in Grassland Cameroon from 1700 to the Present, Professor Suzanne Preston Blier, Director

Black Patriots Project, Jane Ailes and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Co-Directors

Central Africa Diaspora to the Americas Project, Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton (Boston University), Co-Directors

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute, Professors Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Waldo E. Martin (University of California at Berkeley), Jr., and Patricia A. Sullivan (University of South Carolina), Co-directors

New Genetics and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Database Working Group, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelynn M. Hammonds, Co-Directors

W. E. B. Du Bois Society, Karen C. C. Dalton and Jacqueline Rivers, Co-Directors

Welfare, Children and Families: A Three-City Study, Professor William Julius Wilson, Director

Working Group on Environmental Justice, James Hoyte and Timothy C. Weiskel, Program Directors