CLAS offers its students multidisciplinary academic training programs of the highest quality that complement a degree in a discipline or profession. CLAS believes that specialized multidisciplinary training on Latin America and the Caribbean is one important component of an academic program; however, the value of such expertise is greatly strengthened by combining multidisciplinary Latin American area and language training with a degree in a traditional discipline or profession. Consequently, the Center offers graduate and undergraduate interdisciplinary certificates as well as an undergraduate related concentration in Latin American studies in conjunction with the academic or professional degree in the student's major field—an approach that provides its students with dual expertise.
Over 100 University of Pittsburgh faculty members are associated with CLAS. Their teaching expertise and research specializations encompass all of the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries of Latin America and the Caribbean and many of the English-speaking countries. Each academic year, they teach well over 250 courses on the region in more than 20 departments while actively pursuing on-going research projects in a wide range of disciplines, including the social sciences, professional schools, humanities, and natural sciences.
The University of Pittsburgh's Eduardo Lozano Latin American Library Collections aids in this work. The Lozano Collection is one of the top ten Latin American collections in the United States. Housed in Hillman Library, the collection excels in contemporary materials, documents, and statistics. Although the library is strong in almost all substantive and geographic areas of Latin America, it has some of the world’s best resources on Bolivia and Cuba, as well as extensive holdings on Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. Over 85 percent of the volumes in this extraordinary collection are in Spanish and Portuguese.