This has been a year of significant changes for us.  For those of you who regularly visit the Pittsburgh campus in Oakland you know that we have moved to a new location on Forbes Avenue across from Magee Womens Hospital of UPMC.  Our former home of more than 20 years, 121 University Place, has been razed to make room for a new dormitory. The University gave us the opportunity to design our new space, and, as a result, we have a state-of-the-art facility that uniquely suits our needs.  We are now fully operational in our renovated building at 3343 Forbes Avenue, and we invite our colleagues and clients to visit us.

Another development at UCSUR is the addition of the Pittsburgh Indicators Project (Pittsburgh Today) under the direction of Doug Heuck.  The ultimate goal of this project is to spark an informed civic dialogue on where Pittsburgh is and where it is going.  To that end, the project provides evaluative regional performance data on ten topic areas to enable researchers and civic leaders to plan for the region´s future.  We are fortunate to have the support of numerous local foundations to fund this effort.

A third development is the maturation of our cutting edge information technologies infrastructure at the center.  For the past three years we have invested more than $200,000 to develop a state-of-the-art data center for the management and processing of sensitive data.  We operate FISMA/HIPPA compliant data management systems, and we are now prepared to offer cost-effective solutions for the data management, security, and privacy needs of the campus community.

The center continues to aggressively pursue other opportunities to enhance its research infrastructure, broaden the range of support services available to faculty and the community, expand the participation of faculty and graduate students in center research programs, and strengthen University-community collaborations.  The center serves as the interdisciplinary crossroads for schools throughout the University and has become a major resource in mentoring and supporting the research careers of junior faculty and postdoctoral students.  Eighty research projects involving most of the schools of the University were carried out, and several dozen undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty were mentored by center staff.  Finally, the center had an impressive record of academic achievement with more than 45 peer reviewed journal publications, and 10 invited book chapters.

I am particularly proud of the academic productivity of the center, which puts it on par with some of the larger departments on campus.  This is a remarkable achievement when you consider that this represents the work of a core center staff comprised of a few part-time faculty members and three PhD level staff.