Dr. Rebecca Hite is an Associate Professor of STEM Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Texas Tech University. She serves as the primary director of the Center for Advocacy in Teacher Leadership for Youth and Schools with Technology (CATALYST) and as an Associate Director of Professional Development in the Center for Innovative Research in Leadership and Education (CIRCLE). She is PI of NSF award #1852944, "Leveraging Learning Assistantships, Mentoring, and Scholarships to Develop Self-Determined Mathematics Teachers for West Texas."

Prior to graduate school, Dr. Hite taught high school science and geography for 13 years in the public schools of North Carolina. Hite's education policy experiences stem from her service as a Congressional Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow in Washington, D.C. with the Honorable Danny K. Davis (7th district of IL) from 2012-2013, as a district intern for the Honorable David E. Price (4th district of NC) from 2014-2016, as an NC-EPFP fellow from 2015-2016, and as the founder and primary director of TX-EPFP from 2019-2024.

In recognition of her efforts, Dr. Hite has been awarded the 2016 John C. Park National Technology Leadership Fellowship Award in science education by The Association for Science Teacher Education (ASTE), best paper in the AERA Applied Research in Immersive Environments for Learning (ARiEL) Special Interest Group (SIG) in 2017, and the Outstanding Mentorship of Under/Graduate Students in STEM Education award from Association for Science Teacher Education (ASTE) in 2023. At TTU, Dr. Hite has received the 2018 Excellence in IT Innovation Award for immersive technologies at the Museum of Texas Tech University, the Outstanding Researcher Award for 2020, the 2022 TTU President's Emerging Engaged Scholarship Award (for TX-EPFP), the 2022 Chancellor's Council Distinguished Research Award (at the College level), and the 2024 Open Access Intellectual Contributions Award from TTU Libraries.