It’s an honor for the Squirrel Hill Urban Coalition to be able to recognize annually four Squirrel Hill Treasures. These people and places represent what’s wonderful about our community, and each in their own way helps make Squirrel Hill the place we love so much. We want to make sure that you know just how special our 2023 Treasures are, so we asked Luke Chinman, a writer for this magazine and a Squirrel Hill native, to talk with them. Here’s what he discovered about their lives, work, and connections to Squirrel Hill.
2023’S SQUIRREL HILL
TREASURES By Luke Chinman
“There’s a really strong sense of neighborhood cohesion,” she says. “It’s really an amazing, hyper-local model for ways in which we can strengthen our neighborhoods and our connections to each other.”
DR. ELIZABETH MILLER For Liz Miller, Squirrel Hill is more than a neighborhood—it is a community blueprint that she finds herself returning to in her professional work.
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Miller, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and physician at UPMC’s Children’s Hospital, moved to Squirrel Hill in 2011, seeking somewhere with a strong Jewish community and accessibility for elderly populations. And as is true for many a Squirrel Hill family, she had an intergenerational connection as well: her husband, Josh, has a cousin who grew up on Beechwood Boulevard, not far from where their family moved.
In her professional work, Miller has spent over 20 years in adolescent health research examining issues of health equity and interpersonal violence prevention. Aside from publishing over 330 peer-reviewed research publications, Miller is codirector of The Pittsburgh Study, a community-partnered, collective impact initiative in Allegheny County that promotes racial equity and child thriving, and academic codirector of Community PARTners, the community engagement management core for the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at the University of Pittsburgh. “I’m always in partnership with schools, with community organizations, and with a range of
