PITTSBURGH — Just over 40 years ago, the steel industry that dominated the Pittsburgh skyline and economy vanished. The industry that had employed 90,000 people in western Pennsylvania shuttered, and as a result, hundreds of thousands of people moved away. The city’s unemployment rate hit a whopping 17%.

But since President Donald Trump has been sworn into office with a pledge toward cutting fat and improving efficiencies, a revival has begun from an unlikely source: the University of Pittsburgh and neighboring Carnegie Mellon University, which draw to the city medical and scientific researchers, tech startups, and innovators to do their work at these universities. In fact, university presidents across the region and state have been trying to unpack which, if any, of their programs would be on the chopping block in terms of funding for biomedical research.