Carnegie Mellon University

July 24, 2019

Dear Members of the Carnegie Mellon University Community:

I am delighted to announce an exciting opportunity for CMU to expand its presence at Hazelwood Green, which is being developed with the leadership of three foundations — the Richard King Mellon Foundation, The Heinz Endowments and the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation. Carnegie Mellon has acquired options that will allow our university to add 8.3 additional acres at the site for long-term future use. We will be forming a committee to involve the campus community and engage key stakeholders in the process of planning our future there.

The additional acreage in Hazelwood Green provides important and needed flexibility for the university’s long-term expansion plan, yielding several co-located building sites that would allow CMU to construct research and office facilities, as well as high-bay and laboratory spaces in a campus-like setting. This gives us an opportunity to deepen our core mission of education and research, along with our commitment to local economic development by attracting new industry partners and jobs to the area.

We are proud that Carnegie Mellon was an early adopter of the first building on this 178-acre, mixed-use project site of a former Pittsburgh steel mill. Mill 19 is home to the cutting-edge nonprofit Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) institute and our Manufacturing Futures Initiative (MFI). ARM is a $250-million public-private collaborative catalyzed by CMU that puts new technologies to work for industry. Both ARM and MFI, an interdisciplinary research initiative, were launched with the help of a $20 million gift from the Richard King Mellon Foundation, which provided significant support for research and the new facility.

Today’s announcement represents the first step of a focused and comprehensive planning process to shape our presence at Hazelwood Green. We recognize the great responsibility this brings and we are fully committed to engaging faculty, staff, students, alumni, partners and our Hazelwood neighbors in this process. To spearhead that collaborative work, we will establish a committee to explore long-term plans for utilizing the property.

I invite you to read our press release for more information. I look forward to working with you and the entire campus community on this extraordinary opportunity.

Warm regards,

Farnam Jahanian
President
Henry L. Hillman President’s Chair