Shannon Dooling and Steve Greenlee received the top faculty awards for 2025-26 from Boston University’s College of Communication, honoring their work in instruction and advising, respectively.

Dooling, a COM associate professor of the practice in journalism, is the recipient of this year’s Becker Family Teacher-of-the-Year Award, considered the highest honor presented by COM to its professors. The award was established in memory of David Brudnoy, a legend in Boston broadcasting and a professor at COM.

In presenting the award during the 2025 convocation ceremony, COM Dean Mariette DiChristina said Dooling “has demonstrated exceptional teaching, and her student evaluations are among the highest in the department. Her work goes well beyond the classroom. In fact, she took a group of students to the southern U.S. border, to report on immigration. In another collaboration, she and her students created a gripping, important story for WBUR on unsolved homicides in Massachusetts.”

As an investigative reporter in Boston. Dooling’s work can be found on WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station, and nationally with ProPublica and NPR. Her reporting focuses primarily on immigration and criminal justice. In 2019, she broke the national news story about the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle a humanitarian immigration process designed to allow seriously ill immigrants to stay in the U.S. for medical treatment. The process was reinstated following Congressional hearings. Her reporting has won several Edward R. Murrow awards, including awards for continuing coverage and investigative reporting.

Recent Teacher-of-the-Year Award recipients include Adam Lapidus, assistant professor of film and television; Justin Joseph, associate professor of the practice in public relations; Noelle Graves, senior lecturer for journalism; and Amy Shanler, professor of the practice in public relations.

Greenlee, a COM professor of the practice in journalism, is the recipient of this year’s Lyndon Baines Johnson Student Advising Award, nominated by COM students for excellence in student advising.

This award is made possible through a fund established at the College of Communication by Luci Baines Johnson, a friend and Trustee Emeriti of Boston University, in honor of Johnson’s father, President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Before his arrival at COM, Greenlee was the executive editor of the Portland Press Herald in Maine, where he led the paper to major national awards and recognition that included the paper’s first Pulitzer Prize finalist for a series he directed on climate change. Before that, Steve spent 12 years as an editor at the Boston Globe, where he led a team of award-winning journalists and also served as the Globe’s jazz critic.

Recent Advising Award recipients include A. Sherrod Blakely, associate professor of the practice in journalism; Maura Smith, master lecturer for film; Steve Quigley, now professor emeritus for public relations; and Lisa Borden, associate professor of the practice in advertising.

Following the teacher and adviser award presentations, DiChristina announced four recipients of the Dean’s Award for Alumni Initiatives and Innovation, funded by her own gift to the college and supplemented this year by donations from the Dean’s Advisory Board. The 2026 winners:

• Michelle DeLateur, content producer
• Tina McDuffie, associate professor of the practice, journalism
• Sung-Un Yang, chair, Department of Mass Communication, Advertising and Public Relations
• Eric Gordon, director of the Center of Media Innovation for Social Impact.