During the 1960s, Pittman worked with the Cholera Research Laboratory in Dacca, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) on a Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) project headed by Dr. Joseph E. Smadel, an associate director at NIH. After Smadel's sudden death in 1963, Pittman served as project director for five years. With her colleagues, she demonstrated that the potency assay of the cholera vaccine was directly related to the effectiveness of the vaccine.