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Grace Skogstad, a professor in the department of political science in the Faculty of Arts & Science, has been awarded a 2021 JJ Berry Smith Award for Doctoral Supervision.

The annual awards honour faculty members who, over a minimum of a 15-year period, have demonstrated excellence in graduate supervision at the University of Toronto.

“I’ve really enjoyed working with my students and getting to know them,” says Skogstad, who specializes in the areas of comparative public policy and Canadian politics and has been teaching at U of T for 35 years. “Not just as the intellectual heavyweights they are, but also as the wonderful people they are.”

Skogstad, whose first doctoral student became a professor at Yale, has worked closely with more than 60 graduate students as supervisor or dissertation committee member. Her students, many of whom have gone on to prestigious careers in public policy and academia, often single out the time and energy she invests in each student.

“Dr. Skogstad is an incredibly prolific scholar with an active program of research, and yet she was also always available,” says one former student, now an assistant professor of comparative public policy. “She would read and comment extensively on grant proposals, research ethics submissions, and draft dissertation chapters within days with prescient critiques that would push me conceptually and methodologically.”