Emily Rothman is recipient of 2024 Patricia Buehler Legacy Award for Clinical Innovation
October 24, 2024

Emily Rothman, professor and chair of the Occupational Therapy Department at Boston University’s Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, was awarded the division’s 2024 Patricia Buehler Legacy Award for Clinical Innovation. Rothman delivered her Buehler Award lecture titled “‘Nothing About Us Without Us:’ Meaningful Research Partnership with Autistic People to Promote Healthy Relationships.”

In her early professional career, Rothman worked in a domestic violence shelter, at a counseling program for men who perpetrated domestic violence and volunteered for a sexual assault telephone hotline in Vermont. Since earning her doctorate in science degree from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2004, her research has focused on understanding the etiology and prevention of intimate partner and sexual violence, firearm violence, human trafficking and pornography.

In 2016, Rothman began a new line of research focused on autism, informed by a neurodiversity perspective and conducted in partnership with autistic people. Some studies include the development of a new intervention to support autistic people’s relationship skills—such as respecting boundaries, identifying warning signs of abuse, and discussing sexual preferences—in both platonic friendships and intimate dating relationships. The Healthy Relationships on the Autism Spectrum, or HEARTS, program is rooted in neurodiversity, co-taught by an autistic and non-autistic team, and affirms all relationship types and styles, genders, and sexual orientations.

A through-line of her body of scholarship is a focus on health equity for marginalized populations, in particular sexual- and gender-minoritized and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) populations. She has published more than 130 peer-reviewed papers in journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, Pediatrics, American Journal of Public Health, OTJR: Occupational Therapy Journal of Research and the American Journal of Occupational Therapy.

Rothman has earned more than $8 million in external research funds including grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Justice, US Department of Defense, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Patient Centered Outcomes Institute, and the Organization for Autism Research. She is appointed to the Massachusetts Governor’s Council on Sexual and Domestic Violence, and she served on the Massachusetts Task Force on Sexual Assault Climate Surveys.

The Patricia Buehler Legacy Award for Clinical Innovation is presented each year by the USC Chan Division in honor of the life’s work of alumna and long-time supporter Patricia “Pat” Buehler ’49. Buehler’s craft sample book, woven materials and original box-and-block test — tools for craft-based rehabilitation during the 1950s and ’60s — are housed at the USC Chan Archive at the Center for Occupation and Lifestyle Redesign.

Thanks to the generosity of the Patricia Buehler Administrative Trust, the Patricia Buehler Legacy Award for Clinical Innovation was established in 2008 in loving memory of Pat, with the intent to increase the visibility and applications of occupational science and of occupational therapy best practices.

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