Board of Trustees approves office consolidation

University officials voted at a Board of Trustees meeting Monday to approve a resolution that… University officials voted at a Board of Trustees meeting Monday to approve a resolution that will allow the Department of Biomedical Informatics to consolidate its offices.

The department will lease 20,624 square feet of space on the fourth and fifth floors of the Offices at Baum, on Baum Boulevard in Oakland, for a seven-year period starting April 1, 2012, and running through March 2019. The new lease will have an annual cost of $811,536 with a one-percent increase each April. Currently DBMI leases 23,262 square feet of space in two separate locations in Oakland and Shadyside.

“DBMI has received all necessary approvals within the University, and it has been determined that the funding sources will be sufficient to fund the rental charges imposed for this lease agreement,” executive vice chancellor Jerome Cochran said.

DBMI, which offers M.S. and Ph. D. degrees through Pitt’s School of Medicine, receives approximately $20 million in grant support through the fiscal year of 2013. The grants come from several agencies including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Defense, the Pennsylvania Department of Public Health and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.