Three faculty members in the University of Pittsburgh Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences received funded professional development leaves for the 2026-27 academic year.
The Professional Development Leave (PDL) program is a paid, one-semester leave opportunity that allows eligible faculty to step away from their regular teaching and service duties to focus on scholarly, curricular or community-engaged projects that advance Pitt’s educational and service missions and provide clear benefits to students and the broader community.
Now in its second year in the Dietrich School, the program underscores the University’s commitment to recognizing and investing in the professional growth of appointment-stream faculty whose work is central to student learning.
This year’s recipients and their projects are:
Liberty Ferda
Liberty Ferda is a teaching professor in the Department of English, where she teaches grant writing, professional and community-engaged writing, and creative nonfiction. Ferda co-leads long-running grant-writing workshops at Pitt’s Community Engagement Centers. During her professional development leave, she will expand these workshops by developing online and hybrid grant-writing courses and building structured partnerships with local foundations such as the Heinz Endowments and The Pittsburgh Foundation. This work will broaden access for working adults and neighborhood nonprofit leaders, help small community organizations become more competitive for funding and create online materials that can also enrich undergraduate grant-writing courses at Pitt.
Shannon Reed
Shannon Reed is a teaching professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Writing Program, where she teaches the full fiction curriculum and is an accomplished author of books and essays on reading, teaching and contemporary culture. Her professional development leave will support the completion and revision of “Briskaway,” a novel that explores memory, accountability and queer history through the lens of a theater director revisiting a pivotal summer at a performing arts camp. Immersing in the long-form fiction and revision process will directly strengthen the mentorship she offers students writing their own book-length projects, giving them concrete models of craft, revision and publication as well as deepening classroom conversations about ethics, identity and representation in contemporary fiction.
Evgeni “Eugene” Trofimov
Evgeni Trofimov is a teaching professor and undergraduate assistant director in the Department of Mathematics, where he oversees foundational courses in calculus and theoretical mathematics and supporting both campus and College in High School instruction. During his professional development leave, he will write a Pitt-aligned transition-to-proof textbook for Math 0413 and create standardized Canvas master shells for key lower-division math courses. These resources will improve students’ proof-writing skills, provide a more precise and more consistent learning experience for hundreds of undergraduates each semester, reduce course costs and give instructors — especially new and part-time faculty — a robust shared framework for high-quality math instruction.