This award provides start up funding for the establishment of a Research Data Center in the Atlanta Metro area. Research Data Centers provide academic researchers with secure access for research that uses confidential data from the Census Bureau.
The new RDC is housed in a secure site at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and is sponsored by a consortium of institutions including Georgia State University, Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the University of Georgia. The Centers for Disease Control will also contribute to the funding and management of the RDC. The center will be open to researchers from anywhere in the United States; the location makes this RDC especially attractive to researchers in a large multi-state area. This Research Data Center will join a national network of Census RDCs. Each is operated by a hosting academic institution and each provides secure access for qualified researchers.
A large and broad community of researchers will use this RDC, including researchers in Economics, Public Health, Sociology, Management, Demography, and Geography. The projects undertaken by these researchers will provide a variety of broader impact, including improvements in the Census Bureau's data programs and assistance to the CDC as it considers whether or not to adopt the sample frame of the Census Bureau's confidential American Community Survey for the National Immunization Survey.
(ACRDC) was to serve scholars from multiple institutions in the Southeast so that they could use RDC data and produce high-quality research. To do so, it was essential to build a first-rate facility accessible to researchers, to have good leadership from an executive director and Census administrator, to educate the research community about ACRDC opportunities, and to establish a a financially secure and growing consortium of member institutions. We have been successful in fulfilling these goals. We have a first-rate facility housed at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta that is readily accessible to researchers in Atlanta and surrounding areas. The ACRDC has both a highly able director and Census administrator. The ACRDC has expanded from its original seven consortium members to a current nine members, with a tenth instItution's membership recently finalized. The original members are: Georgia State University (PI), the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta (which houses the ACRDC), the CDC, Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Georgia, and the University of Alabama-Birmingham. Subsequently added members are the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and Clemson University. Membership for a tenth institution, Florida State University, was finalized shortly following the 9/30/2014 completion of the NSF grant. ACRDC members are located in five states, with six institutions in Georgia and one each in Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Florida. The ACRDC's solid financial base, coupled with the large number of member institutions, has enabled it to begin serving a large and diverse research community in the Southeast. We are confident that benefits from the ACRDC will continue to grow and extend well into the future.
