Dr. Lina Dostilio is the Associate Vice Chancellor for Community Engagement at the University of Pittsburgh. She is responsible for supporting community-facing work that includes community relations, cultivating strategic opportunities to advance Pitt’s community engagement agenda, and implementing the University’s place-based community engagement initiative through the development of neighborhood-based community engagement centers.
Dostilio is the 2019 Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities Research Fellow. In this role, she is developing a multi-institution research project that investigates the impact of place-based community engagement on community capacities. She was previously the Scholar in Residence directing the Campus Compact’s Project on the Community Engagement Professional, a national research project staffed by 19 research fellows across the country that has produced, The Community Engagement Professional in Higher Education: A Competency Model for an Emerging Field (Stylus Publishing, 2017) and The Community Engagement Professional Guidebook (Stylus Publishing, 2019). Dostilio has also served as a past-chair of the Board of Directors of the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement and is on the editorial board of the Metropolitan Universities. Her research as a scholar-administrator has focused on multi-sector partnership development, place-based community engagement, and the evolution of the community engagement profession within higher education.