By The Star Staff
The U.S. Census Bureau has opened a Federal Statistical Research Center in Puerto Rico, the first one in the U.S. territories, allowing access to a wide range of sensitive data collected by the U.S. government including information on demographics, wages, housing and health, according to a report in the journal Science.
After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, social scientists on the island wanted to launch studies that would inform efforts to rebuild and strengthen its battered communities and economy, but the researchers couldn’t access U.S. government data. To get those data, they would have to travel to one of the U.S. Census Bureau’s 33 secure, limited-access data centers scattered across the mainland United States, the Science report said.
The new center will allow “academics to explore critical research topics,” and enable “local officials to make more informed, data-driven decisions,” said Don Graves, deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of Commerce, the bureau’s parent agency, as quoted by Science, during a Sept. 9 ribbon-cutting ceremony in San Juan.
Once up and fully running later this year, the center will enable researchers in Puerto Rico to apply for local access to a massive trove of data assembled by federal agencies such as the Census Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service and the National Center for Health Statistics.
Raúl Santiago-Bartolomei, an urban planner at the University of Puerto Rico, said he hopes to tap data that will inform his work on housing affordability and what happens to residents displaced by natural disasters such as Hurricane Maria, according to Science. Elizabeth Fussell, a sociologist and demographer at Brown University, expects the center to help foster collaborations between researchers based in Puerto Rico and on the U.S. mainland.
The center could also help researchers in the territory become more competitive for federal research grants.
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