Star Profile
by John Temple Ligon
Temple@TheColumbiaStar.com

Harris Pastides, USC's VP for Research and Health Science

As USC's VP, Harris Pastides oversees the investments in research and the deans in medicine, public health, nursing, pharmacy, and social work. He also maintains the push behind Innovista, the university's 500- acre expansion from Main Street to the Congaree River, for which he courts major private investment and research facility relocation.

Pastides was born in the NYC borough of Queens, in the Astoria neighborhood, where they manufactured Steinway pianos. The neighborhood library, directly across the street from the Pastides's home, was the Steinway Branch of the New York Public Library.

Pastides's parents came over from Cyprus in 1948. They wrapped Pastides in an American flag for his home arrival after his 1954 birth at Astoria General. His mother was a tailor and a homemaker, while his father was a restaurateur.

Pastides's father had his own place, The Star Food Shop, in Washington Heights, north of Columbia University.

The family took Sundays in Central Park, the ideal meeting ground for all of New York's melting pot, a place where Pastides and his older sister met mostly Man- hattan kids.

Pastides made the grade on the entrance exam to enroll in Stuyvesant High School, one of three original highly competitive specialized high schools in New York City. He was the literary editTohre f Ionrd tihcae tsocrhool's yearbook, .

Pastides earned a full- tuition scholarship to attend the State University at Albany, where he was in the student senate. He participated in a summer program at the London School of Economics, which helped him graduate early.

Pastides took the offers from Yale University to pursue two master's and the eventual PhD in public health. While at Yale, he helped community health centers in New Haven, which included running a fresh- food co- op.

In his third year at Yale, Pastides was asked to attend a social drop- in to meet the first- year arrivals, which is where he met his wife, Patricia.

They married in the spring of 1980 at the Yale Divinity School, even though Pastides had a year left to finish his research and complete his dissertation.

Pastides's first job offers included a traditional professor track at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, which he took and that led him to a country house beside a brook. The house was affordable because it came with an assumable 10.5% V.A. mortgage, as opposed to the open market's 16%.

The dean at the UMass School of Public Health when Pastides came on board was Dr. Andrew Sorensen, USC's current president. Pastides worked his way to the role of chairman of the department of epidemiology and bio- statistics.

His first Fulbright scholarship was at the University of Athens, which became an opportunity to tour the Cycladic Islands. His second Fulbright was in Geneva with the World Health Organization, where his children learned French and German.

In 1998, USC asked Pastides to assume the job of dean at public health, which he took for four years. Pastides accepted Norman Arnold's offer to put $10,000,000 into a new building, and the university changed the name of the school to the Norman Arnold School of Public Health, the first in the country at a public university to be named after a private donor. The new building is at the corner of College and Assembly, where Innovista begins.

Having been USC's VP for Research and Health Science since 2002, Pastides says timing and context and market forces combine almost perfectly for Innovista to take off as a "best in class" research park development.