Freedom House Ambulance service employed young African Americans who were deemed "unemployable". Several members of Freedom House went on to establish successful careers in EMS and public safety. In 1976, Safar co-founded the World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine (WADEM), which is dedicated to saving lives in major disasters. He stepped down from the chairmanship of anesthesiology at the University of Pittsburgh and founded the International Resuscitation Research Center (now the University of Pittsburgh Safar Center for Resuscitation Research) in 1979, dedicated to cardiopulmonary cerebral resuscitation (CPCR). With Nicholas Bircher he published a textbook on CPCR that became the international standard. In March 1989, he assembled an interdisciplinary team of researchers – composed of the following individuals: Miroslav Klain, M.D. (Anesthesiologist), Edmund Ricci, Ph. D. (Evaluation research), Ernesto A. Pretto, Jr., M.D. (Anesthesiologist), Joel Abrams, Ph.D. (Engineering), and Louise Comfort, Ph. D. (Social Science) – which became known as the University of Pittsburgh Disaster Reanimatology Study Group (DRSG). This research team in partnership with a team of Russian and Armenian physicians conducted the first international interdisciplinary disaster evaluation research field survey study of the earthquake in Armenia. The Armenia study led to a series of post-disaster field studies by the DRSG in Costa Rica (1991), Turkey (1993), and Japan (1994). These studies helped to establish the "Golden 24 Hours" of emergency response in disasters and inspired Norwegian anesthesiologist and humanitarian Dr. Knut Ole Sundnes to establish in 1995 the Task Force of Quality Control of Disaster Management (TFQCDM), under the auspices of the Nordic Society of Disaster Medicine and WADEM. Safar practiced and taught clinical anesthesiology at Presbyterian University Hospital in Pittsburgh until the age of 65, but he continued his research activities until his death. His lifelong goal was to "save the hearts and brains of those too young to die" and to improve the life-saving potential in disasters, a field he called "Disaster Reanimatology." In 1990, he appointed Ernesto Pretto, M.D., as leader of the Disaster program. In 1999, Safar was awarded the Cross of Honor, Austria’s highest civilian honor, for his services in the field of medicine. He was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Medicine.