THE LOOP — The University of Chicago is dramatically increasing its research in the vexing problems of the South Side and urban neighborhoods across the country with a $10 million donation from the Pritzker Foundation.
The new University of Chicago Urban Labs will bring together researchers at the Crime Lab, the Urban Education Lab and other departments to expand the study of crime, education, energy and the environment, health and poverty.
“We need to know what works based on evidence and data,” said university President Robert Zimmer. “The Urban Lab will build on the successful initiatives started at Crime Lab and the Urban Education Lab.”
The Poverty Lab will be one of the new initiatives of Urban Lab. The new director, economics professor Marianne Bertrand, said the new lab will allow researchers to do more work on the troubles facing young parents that the Crime and Urban Education labs don’t study directly.
“When we can be supporting parents rather than supplementing them, that is the biggest area in the city where we can see success,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose staff has already met with Bertrand to talk about her research.
The new lab will bring under one roof Bertrand, Jens Ludwig, a co-founder of the Crime and Urban Education Labs; Dr. David Meltzer, the director of the Center for Health and Social Sciences; and professor Michael Greenstone, the director of the Energy Policy Institute of Chicago.
Tim Knowles, the chairman of the Urban Education Institute, will oversee the new lab.
Separately, the group of researchers has tracked where Chicago’s illegal guns are coming from, how high school students benefit from direct mentoring and how the patients could benefit from home visits by doctors and other healthcare workers.
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