Virginia M. Pitts, PhD

Educational Researcher, Northwestern University

Virginia Pitts is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy, where she currently studies school leadership and the ways in which it is distributed across all members of the school organization. She earned her Ph.D. in Learning Sciences, which focuses on how people think and learn in social contexts and on the design of learning environments.

Virginia is particularly interested in student motivation, and in how we can create learning environments that engage the hearts and minds of all students. The focus of her dissertation work was on student motivation in 7th-grade science classrooms. In addition, she is interested in eventually combining her interests in learning, psychology, and group dynamics to design programs or curricula that help students deal with stress and emotion.

Prior to starting the Ph.D. program at Northwestern, Virginia worked as a business and change management consultant for 10 years.

Virginia currently lives in Evanston, Illinois. She has also lived in rural Oklahoma (where she grew up), Cincinnati, Ohio (spent four years there after undergrad), and Boulder, Colorado (where she lived for two years before moving to Evanston – still misses those mountains sometimes!). She loves nature and playing outside, reading (everything from psychology to spirituality to mythology to fun fiction), and conversations with friends of all ages.

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