By MARTY LEVINE

Nearly nine years in the making, the new Federal Statistical Research Data Center in a secure facility in the Cathedral of Learning will allow researchers to access detailed non-public government data sets for projects studying labor markets, public health, crime patterns, housing trends and many other areas.

Pitt, under economics faculty member Randall Walsh, and Carnegie Mellon have teamed to bring one of these centers to Pittsburgh. Free to researchers from these campuses, such facilities are normally costly and sometimes prohibitively distant for researchers without a local center. Pitt and CMU are already in talks with other local universities to join this consortium for their own researchers’ benefits.

While there are more than 35 such centers around the country, the nearest one previously was at Penn State. Researchers at these facilities are not allowed to discuss the data they have seen there, prior to publication, except within the center itself, making it hard for doctoral student researchers in particular to work with their faculty committees if their theses use data acquired under such rules.

About nine years ago, Walsh helped to convene researchers from Pitt, CMU, Duquesne, West Virginia University and Rand (the nonprofit research company with a prominent Pittsburgh office) to gauge interest in requesting a center from the U.S. Census Bureau, which runs the program. There was indeed a lot of interest, he said.

The data center was actually OK’d six years ago, but it took a few more years to get construction approved. “The federal government, rightly so, takes the security of this data very seriously,” Walsh said. Researchers who pass the application process will be working on a server in Washington, D.C., which is connected to the data center in Pittsburgh through an encrypted line.

The center, in the Cathedral’s basement, houses individual work stations as well as a conference room. “It’s easier to get approval if there are no windows” in the proposed site, Walsh added — and he wasn’t kidding. Even the facility’s ductwork had to re-fashioned with protections to prevent anyone with nefarious intent from crawling through.

A handful of projects have already moved from data centers in other cities to the Pitt center, Walsh said, while others are “in the works” to join it. “We expect that to step up” in the fall, he added, when they plan to publicize the facility in individual Pitt schools.

If you need to understand the dynamics of housing markets down to where individuals have lived over time; how businesses make decisions about job relocations and production shifts; how people’s health histories might be linked to specific disease causes; how patterns of crime relate to rates of recidivism; or how birth neighborhoods affect individuals’ paths in life, this data set is “so valuable, you just can’t do without it.”

The federal website for these data centers lists specific data sets for the federal agencies that provide access to their restricted-use data, including primarily the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; Bureau of Economic Analysis; Federal Reserve Board’s Microeconomic Surveys Unit; Internal Revenue Service Statistics of Income Division; National Center for Health Statistics; National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics; and, of course, the Census Bureau. It also includes selected surveys and administrative data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics; Bureau of Transportation Statistics; Energy Information Administration; Environmental Protection Agency; Social Security Administration; USDA Economic Research Service; and Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Security measures are stringent from beginning to end of a researcher’s work in the center, Walsh said. First is the application (available through the Standard Application Process Portal at www.ResearchDataGov.org), with requirements specific to each agency from which data is sought. Researchers approved then must go through an FBI background check and take trainings concerning security measures and appropriate use of the data.

Even when results are ready to be published, he noted, prospective papers need to go through “disclosure review” by the specific agency providing the data set to make sure such data could not be tied to individuals. The government is thorough there as well, comparing your results to what other researchers have published from the same data sets to make sure that, using both results, no one could recreate the original data set.

In Walsh’s department, he noted, “We started to recognize when we were recruiting, both faculty and students, one of the factors in (their) deciding to go somewhere else was more access to one of these data centers.” The conclusion: “Pitt and CMU should really have access to one of these centers.”

“Having the research here,” closer to your home campus, he continued, also “makes one think more actively, ‘What can I do with it?’”

Shawn Ratcliff from the Census Bureau is on site as the data center’s administrator to help prospective and active users through it all, Walsh said. He also credited Robert K. Cunningham, vice chancellor for research infrastructure, and his office for making sure the data center came to fruition: “They have been so supportive and so effective in making this happen,” he said.

Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.

Have a story idea or news to share? Share it with the University Times.

Follow the University Times on Facebook.