Virgil David Cantini was an American enamelist, sculptor and educator. He was well known for innovation with enamel and steel and received both local and national recognition for his work, including honorary awards, competitive prizes and commissions, along with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1957. Cantini long served as a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh, where he helped to create the Department of Studio Arts. A longtime resident of the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cantini died on May 2, 2009, at the age of 90. Today, many of his large scale works are on display throughout the city of Pittsburgh.

Parran Hall is the former name of an academic building on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh on Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The building, constructed to house the Graduate School of Public Health, was completed in 1957, and designed by Eggers & Higgins, architects of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, in the International Style with a major addition by Deeter-Ritchey-Sippel and Crump completed in 1967. The school was founded in 1948 with a $13.6 million grant from the A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust. It was originally named after Thomas Parran Jr., a former head of the United States Public Health Service at the time the Public Health Service was sponsoring the Tuskegee experiment, in which patients with syphilis were studied but did not receive treatment for the disease.