Pittsburgh, PA (Oakland, Squirrel Hill) is a great place.
Housing close to the city can be found pretty cheap.
CMU, Pitt Med School, RAND.
It definitely has topography.
Has a small biotech community.
Housing is very cheap here; it's one of the few housing markets in the country with the peculiar property that a monthly mortgage payment would be less than rent on an equivalent house. I wouldn't recommend raising a family in Oakland, which is turning into a student ghetto all over, but Squirrel Hill's a good neighborhood.
There's a whole lot of topography and global warming has made our winters a little better.
Major cons: cold winters (it hit the single digits recently), shitty road surfaces