Surprising Pittsburgh

I found a city transformed. {Pittsburgh} may have been founded on coal, iron and oil, the pillars of the industrial age, but in the post-industrial era, it has reinvented itself. -The Financial Times/London

Has anyone seen my robot?

Pittsburgh has served as midwife to everything from alternating current to aluminum, Big Steel and the Big Mac. The Wall Street Journal has christened the city—with an economy increasingly driven by university research and their for-profit spin-offs—as “Roboburgh” and Silicon Alley.

At The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, an effort launched by NASA, researchers have developed the first complete anatomically based mechanical hand to aid in the study and techniques of hand reconstruction. These kinds of biomedical innovations have become key to the region’s rebirth.

At the University of Pittsburgh, new synergies develop daily from the pool of talent, technology and other resources available within the various Health Sciences schools and departments. The University of Pittsburgh ranks ninth in total National Institutes of Health funding, with grants totaling $242 million.

Below are some quick links to help you map your way to the next great drug discovery, a revolutionary gene-based treatment or some other important advance in medicine.

Biomedicine
Biomedical enterprise—much of it joining the medical expertise of the University of Pittsburgh with the imaging and computer technology at Carnegie Mellon University—has spawned more than 30 companies since 1996, attracting 6,200 researchers and other professionals. Officials recently unveiled Pittsburgh BioVenture, a partnership of the academic and business communities to grow the local biotechnology industry.
BioVenture Press Release

BioVenture Studies and Reports

BioVenture Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article

Genomics
Driven by the successful mapping of the human genome, research budgets are expected to soar in coming years as scientists seek to turn basic DNA information into understanding and eventually treatments, tests and cures. None of that can happen without the world’s most advanced data processing technology. Biomedical researchers at The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center have access to the new Terascale Computing System, one of the world’s most powerful processors, in their search for new insights into structural biology, micro-physiology and neural modeling.

Robotics
The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University conducts basic and applied research in robotics technologies, including instrumentation and software for medical robotics and computer-assisted surgery.

Tissue Engineering
The Pittsburgh Tissue Engineering Initiative (PTEI) has made Pittsburgh an international center of excellence in tissue engineering research and education. PTEI hosted the first-ever Engineering Tissue Growth International Conference and Exposition here in 2001.