Dr. Lina Dostilio joined the Office of Community and Governmental Relations in 2017 as the Associate Vice Chancellor for Community Engagement.
In her role as Associate Vice Chancellor, she supports the University’s community-facing work including 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 an associate professor of practice in the Department of Educational Foundations, Organizations, and Policy in the School of Education and is also a Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities Research Fellow. In this role, she convenes institutions of higher education from across the country that are implementing hyperlocal, place-based forms of community engagement.
Previously, she was 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).
She has 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.