Key Areas

Mentoring and advising • training and development • student success • student success hub • undergraduate student resources • academic intervention • academic technology • action research

Vice Provost Role

As the Vice Provost for Student Success, Dr. Belback develops and implements strategies for enhancing Pitt’s ability to realize the tenets of the Cultivate Student Success pillar within the Plan for Pitt. In this role, she advocates and creates opportunities for students by providing a system of academic support to boost retention, persistence, and graduation. Through collaboration with colleges, schools, and campus partners, Belback and team intentionally coordinate purposeful programming and holistic advising interventions and work closely with academic and student affairs leaders to continuously improve our support for students. Importantly, the Vice Provost not only focuses on undergraduate students on the Pittsburgh campus but intentionally considers the impact of their work on regional campus students as well as master’s and professional students within Pitt’s graduate ranks.

Dr. Belback developed Pitt's first student success framework and leads the central Office of the Provost Student Success Team (a growing portfolio of 17 full-time staff as well as faculty mentors and student workers), dedicated to supporting student success across the Pitt community.  

She spearheads the implementation of the Advising Coordination Project, as Pitt moves from a decentralized to a shared advising model to streamline the student experience and boost student success measures for over 21,000 undergraduate students. Through this model, 13 undergraduate college and school directors (and associated academic advising units with over 120 full-time staff) report to Belback, who coordinates shared intervention strategies, expectations, assessment, and goals.

Belback also coordinates student success across Pitt’s regional campuses (Bradford, Johnstown, and Greensburg) through the implementation of the PRSSIM (Pitt Partners for Rural Student Success Impact and Mobility) Project, impacting an additional 4,000 students with initiatives such as advising, mentoring, coaching, tutoring, career exploration, and student success technology.

Through a transformational leadership lens, Belback (a certified LUMA human-centered design practitioner) prioritizes providing the campus community with professional development and training opportunities the goal of building connection, raising motivation, and driving organizational change. These include strategic leadership retreats, planning sessions, large-scale collaborative forums, and consultations. 

Professional Biography

April Belback, DEd, serves as the Vice Provost for Student Success at the University of Pittsburgh. Since 2019, she had been dedicated to the University's collaborative vision for holistic advising, mentoring, and student success. Belback spearheads the implementation of Pitt's Advising Coordination Project, guiding the transition from a decentralized to a shared advising model. This initiative has yielded a 9% increase in overall student satisfaction with advising (80-89%) and institutional high watermarks for first-year retention and six-year graduation rates.

Through national collaborations and a secondary appointment as an associate in Pitt’s Learning Research and Development Center, her research focuses on the impact of shared advising models on student success outcomes. She has authored several publications and has active research grants on the subject.

Dr. Belback has also provided training and consulting to over 25 institutions seeking best practices in change management and organizational redesign. She co-leads the steering committee for the Advising Administration Community of Practice (AACoP) through the Association of Undergraduate Education at Research Universities (UERU) and serves as NACADA's (Global Community for Academic Advising) Chair of the Advising Administrator Community.

A proud first-generation college student herself, Belback has a long history of educating and working with at-promise student populations. Prior to Pitt, she served as the Director of Advising and the Division of Undergraduate Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, Greater Allegheny, where the first-generation and low-income student population is over 50%. Belback also served as the campus Program Director for TRIO Student Support Services. Earlier in her career, Belback’s focus was on rural education, where she taught high school English, was a cooperative lead for pre-service teachers, and a temporary faculty member for secondary education at California University of Pennsylvania.