Jeffery is Pittsburgh Today's senior editor, a Pittsburgh-based freelance writer and frequent contributor to Pittsburgh Quarterly. In his past life, he was a reporter and editor for newspapers large and small, only one of which is still in business. His magazine and newspaper reporting has won numerous awards.
Demographics Today
A few years ago, a model that University of Pittsburgh researchers use to help them assess local demographic trends suggested the day was coming. Last year brought further evidence that it, in fact, has arrived: southwestern Pennsylvania has finally turned the corner to become a place where more people arrive than leave. U.S. Internal Revenue …
The Cost of Blight
The Helen S. Faison Arts Academy, Pittsburgh’s newest elementary school, was built with the hope it would help kindle the revitalization of Homewood, which has long been one of the city’s most distressed neighborhoods. With its modern red brick and glass facade, innovative interior design and grassy five-acre campus, it’s clearly an asset any community …
Masters of their Fate
Dawn was still hours away when Jim Rohr emerged from National City Corp. headquarters in downtown Cleveland on Oct. 24, 2008. The streets were empty, but familiar. His grandfather’s deli had stood just across the street. Not far from there was where his father had moved the deli, which later became a restaurant. Rohr worked …
Our Endangered River
It’s a crisp November morning, some 25 years ago. Bob Ging and Don Gales are hunting on a ridge in Lower Turkeyfoot, Somerset County, where green hemlocks mingle with bare winter hardwoods. “Boy, this is beautiful,” says Ging as sunrise reveals the emerald waters of Laurel Hill Creek in the valley. Gales has a timber …
A Friend in Need
Eleanor Ott grew up in a family that encouraged her to pursue her passion in life. What that passion was didn’t become clear until after she left her Lawrence, Kan. home as a high school valedictorian with a college scholarship. She discovered it among refugee families from Iraq, Burundi, Somalia and other desperate lands whose …
Oxymoron or Opportunity?
From Pittsburgh to the hills of West Virginia, a small army of scientists is racing to tame the billions of tons of carbon vented from coal-burning power plants, working with data sets, computer models, cost analyses and other such tools that belie the drama of their high-stakes investigation. Burning coal casts off nasty pollutants, including …
Katherine MacCord: A Chance to Change the World
This fall, 23-year-old Katherine MacCord will begin her studies at England’s Cambridge University on the dime of Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Bill Gates as the first University of Pittsburgh student to earn a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. While such an achievement suggests she followed an academic strategy carefully conceived before college or later, the path that …
All the Comforts of Home — and Then Some
In January, The Pennsylvania Board of Education’s Higher Education Council tossed out this idea for a new kind of institution of higher learning: A no-frills, low-cost college where kids could earn a bachelor’s degree sans the on-campus fitness centers, climbing walls, as-comfy-as-home dorm rooms and other expensive amenities found on many campuses today. An emphasis …
Here’s to You, Mrs. Henderson
Of all of the thousands of students attending classes at the University of Pittsburgh last fall, Elsie Henderson was perhaps the most extraordinary. For starters, she didn’t walk the Oakland campus with an iPod fixed to her ears or consumed in cell phone conversation. She doesn’t own either of those technologies. She doesn’t even own …
The Jet Set
Amadeo Marcos was the first surgeon to take a piece of liver from a healthy living donor and successfully transplant it into an unrelated critically ill patient. In the nine years since, he’s done more of these complex surgeries than anyone. Topping his vitae is his current position, chief of the transplant division at the …
Give me a “P”
By 1995, a dark cloud had settled over the University of Pittsburgh. It was taking a beating in the press as it struggled to deal with one controversy after another. Leadership at the highest level was in transition. Once-generous state subsidies to support its operations were drying up. And when hopes turned to the notion of …
Death cycle
In 2004, the region’s two largest hospital systems sought to redraw the map of Pennsylvania. Although their hospitals, clinics and headquarters all sit in and around Allegheny County, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and West Penn Allegheny Health System asked Medicare, the federal health insurance program for the elderly, to identify them as a …
It’s Pay Dirt
Graham Hatfull, Ph.D., is clearly pleased when presented with a film canister brimming with soil dug from a Penn Hills back yard. Common, every day dirt. An odd gift, to be sure, but one often suggested to anyone meeting the head of the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Biological Sciences for the first time. “Beautiful,” …
A Medical Giant in Our Midst
The year is 1958. Northwestern University nominates one of its bright young physicians, Thomas E. Starzl, for a prestigious Markle Scholarship. He is told to come up with a big idea to propose during his interviews with the selection committee. Something that would be recognized as a remarkable achievement in medical science. Something to build …
An Experience
Inside a red brick Victorian in Aspinwall, on computer hard drives and forms stacked high on the desks of the Tickets For Kids Foundation staff, opportunities are gathered daily that will transport the region’s neediest children to places never seen and worlds never experienced. The Grand Lobby of Heinz Hall. A summer camp in the …
Head Honchos
For five years, Chet Mathis, fellow University of Pittsburgh scientist Dr. Bill Klunk and a team of chemists designed hundreds of chemical compounds looking for one that would open the door to the discovery of a drug capable of taming Alzheimer’s disease. For five years, their lab work and chalkboard theories bought them a few …