Front Range universities to benefit from new CU-Boulder data research hub
BOULDER — Researchers from up and down the Front Range, including Colorado State University in Fort Collins, will be able to use and support a new federal social-science data-research hub being established at the University of Colorado Boulder.
CU Boulder officials announced this week that the National Science Foundation has awarded the school $300,000 over three years to create the Rocky Mountain Research Data Center, which will be housed in the Institute of Behavioral Science.
The center will give social scientists and health researchers from the region access to U.S. Census and other federal statistical data in a secure setting. It will be just the 20th such center in the United States, with school officials expecting it to raise the profile of the university among prospective faculty and graduate students.
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“Graduate students’ ability to do original research will be much, much stronger,” CU economics professor Keith Maskus said in a release. “We will be training generations of graduate students who will have far better familiarity with data and how to use big data sets. That will lead them directly into new kinds of careers.”
Research institutions from the University of Wyoming to CU Anschutz, labs such as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the Colorado state government will be able to access the center.
“The new connections with universities and laboratories in Colorado and Wyoming will increase the breadth of our intellectual networks and the speed with which major social problems are analyzed,” IBS director Myron Gutmann said.
Projects approved for access must “advance scientific knowledge and simultaneously deliver tangible benefits to the federal statistical system,” the school said in the release.
One set of planned projects will study how the movement of U.S. production overseas affects employment and wages across locations and occupations. Another will consider how mineral and energy extraction influences state and local economies. A third will use the data to improve population estimates for small geographic areas and methods for disseminating data for the U.S. Census Bureau.
