Chavella T. Pittman received her PhD in Sociology and a MA in Higher Education from the University of Michigan, USA. She is currently a Professor of Sociology at Dominican University, USA. Chavella is the Founder of Effective & Efficient Faculty which provides consultation, coaching, and workshops to help remove the obstacles to institutional, faculty and student success. Her research expertise includes higher education, interpersonal interactions, marginalised statuses, structural outcomes, research methods and statistics.

She contributed the chapter “Empowered Strategies for Women Faculty of Color Navigating Teaching Inequities in Higher Ed,” published in Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning in 2022 by West Virginia University Press. It details how women faculty of colour can authentically navigate teaching despite institutional attempts to resist and silence them. It also describes how the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) should shift to more deeply consider faculty identities.

She has a love/hate relationship with running, is a beer aficionado, cured her black thumb via growing cherry tomatoes, loves to learn, and believes joy is resistance.