He holds the John V. Osmun Endowed Chair and is the Director of the Center for Urban and Industrial Pest Management at Purdue University.

During his undergraduate career he worked as a summer student at the Plant Biotechnology Institute at National Research Council in Saskatoon, Canada.

During his PhD program he spent time, as a visiting student, at both the University of Chicago in the Department of Ecology and Evolution and at CSIRO at Black Mountain in Canberra, Australia.

In 2018, Michigan State University appointed him as the associate departmental chairperson of the Department of Entomology and the director of Feed the Future Legume Systems Research Innovations Lab.

[8][9] In January of 2021, he returned to Purdue University where he holds John V. Osmun Endowed Chair and is the Director of the Center for Urban and Industrial Pest Management.

[13] Pittendrigh has used Drosophila melanogaster as a model system to understand how organisms respond to dietary factors[14] or drugs,[15] or evolve resistance to xenobiotics such as pesticides.

SAWBO also represents a research platform to study the last mile problem of how to deliver educational content to people in remote areas in developing nation countries.

Based on long-term large datasets of global content use, they were able to demonstrate, that 2016 marked the tipping point of when cell phones overtook computers as the primary mechanism by which people accessed educational videos as learning tools.