Boston University Provost’s Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award: Past Awardees

2026 University Provost’s Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award Winner

Katharine Silbaugh, of the School of Law

For over thirty years, Dr. Katharine Silbaugh has strengthened Boston University through her commitment to excellent scholarship and teaching. A prolific scholar dedicated to her craft, Professor Silbaugh develops and refines insightful ideas and arguments at the forefront of family law and puts them into practice. Over the last decade, her scholarship on the legal interactions between late adolescents and institutions that pursue engagement with youth, like the tobacco industry, has created pathways for mitigating the harmful effects of these entities and led to remarkable legal changes.

With this strong scholarship as her foundation, Dr. Silbaugh creates transformative educational spaces by encouraging students to explore the distance between the unidimensional image of the law as prescriptive commands and the institutional conditions in which people live and respond to lawmaking. As she builds her classroom community, she integrates her research background around adolescent experiences and development to design coursework that engages new law students’ self-perception as emerging adults. She also centers her classroom culture around caring, creating frequent opportunities for feedback and ensuring that her students feel seen and known within their program.

Through her exceptional commitment to rigorous scholarly work, classroom instruction, and student mentorship, Dr. Silbaugh, in the words of her nominator, “[is] an excellent model of how one’s research so frequently enriches one’s teaching” and has profoundly influenced student learning and academic growth at all levels.

* Note: The University Provost’s Scholar Teacher of the Year Award has replaced the United Methodist Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award at Boston University. For a list of past United Methodist award winners, click here.