As Associate Vice Provost, Shelome will work with John Wallace, Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement and Leadership Development (FALD), and FALD staff to advance three core areas. She will focus on faculty advancement, including support for tenure, promotion and research success; leadership development, to include preparation and support for department chairs; and elevating and celebrating, which will expand recognition of faculty achievements through awards, honors and other forms of scholarly distinction.

Shelome is an accomplished scholar and national leader in linguistics and Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Research. She brings extensive experience in faculty leadership, research development and mentoring to these roles. At Pitt she has contributed to University-wide initiatives through her roles as a Faculty Fellow in the Office of the Provost, as Chair of the Department of Linguistics, and as the Research of Impact co-chair for the Plan for Pitt.

She also holds as joint appointment as Associate Vice Chancellor for Research in the Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences and Related Fields

As Pitt’s first-ever Assistant Vice Chancellor for Research in this area, she has built a body of work that has earned Pitt national recognition. She is a 2022 Research Leader Fellow of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities Council on Research (APLU COR). In 2023, she cofounded the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Research Leaders Network, now spanning more than 40 institutions across the US, and she now co-leads APLU COR’s working group on “Championing Humanities and Social Sciences.”

As Associate Vice Chancellor, Shelome will continue to lead this work while expanding our institutional capacity to support humanities, arts and social science research: building seed funding and proposal development support for faculty, strengthening our national leadership in this space and ensuring that these areas of scholarship continue to be recognized as a vital, high-impact part of our research enterprise.

Shelome’s leadership roles at Pitt have spanned multiple capacities, including Chair of the Department of Linguistics in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences; Research of Impact Co-Chair for Plan for Pitt (2021) and University Faculty Mentorship Committee.

She is a 2022 research leader fellow of the APLU Council on Research. In 2023, she co-created the Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences Research Leaders Network (HASS-RLN), a new national effort to support and advance arts, humanities, social sciences, and humanities-adjacent research at comprehensive research universities.

Shelome holds a BA in Linguistics (first-class honors) from the University of the West Indies (Mona, Jamaica) and an MA and PhD in Linguistics from The Ohio State University. Her extensive scholarly contributions include peer-reviewed journal articles, edited volumes, special issues of leading linguistics journals, and invited chapters in prestigious handbooks. She is currently co-editor of the flagship journal, Language.