The University of Michigan is honoring faculty members Samuel Bagenstos and Caroyln Kuranz with the 2025 presidential awards for public engagement, recognizing their commitment to public service and their contributions to significantly impact society through national and state leadership.
Bagenstos, Arlene Susan Kohn Professor of Social Policy at the Ford School and Frank G. Millard Professor of Law at the Michigan Law School, will receive the President's Award for Public Impact, which honors a faculty member who has offered their academic research and expertise in tangible service of a major public sector challenge, at the local, state, national or global level.
Bagenstos and Kuranz will be honored at the President's Symposium on Research Impact and Policy Leadership on March 11.
"Professors Bagenstos and Kuranz are shining examples of the transformative impact that U-M faculty make on the world around us with their scholarship and service," U-M President Domenico Grasso said.
Bagenstos specializes in civil rights, labor and employment law, health law and governance. He's advocated for farmworkers, disabled people facing discrimination when seeking lifesaving care, foster kids, seniors who need affordable medications and all Americans during the pandemic.
"Professor Bagenstos' work as a professor and public intellectual and leading critical government agencies during the COVID pandemic was instrumental in galvanizing our nationwide response in a time of crisis and ensuring access to medical care among the most vulnerable, embodying the President's Award for Public Impact," wrote his nominators.
During the Biden administration, Bagenstos served as general counsel to the Office of Management and Budget and then general counsel to the Department of Health and Human Services. In those roles, he:
- Played a central role in writing new, explicit regulations making clear that discrimination against disabled patients in medical decision making violated Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.
- Helped to draft and implement the American Rescue Plan Act, President Biden's signature COVID relief law.
- Helped build the infrastructure to get the then-new COVID vaccine shots in arms across the country. He led the drafting of regulations across the federal government to promote vaccinations and masking and helped multiple federal agencies get relief funds to state and local governments.
"I've tried to use my professional training to be able to help people in ways that I can, and obviously being a professor at the University of Michigan gives me a particular platform to help bring my expertise to the world at times when it's really needed," Bagenstos said. "I never thought of academic work as a purely inward-focused intellectual enterprise.
"I think that what I'm here to do is generate ideas that are hopefully going to be useful to the world, and sometimes I can make those ideas useful to the world by engaging very directly. And so that's what I've tried to do the whole time I've been a professor."
In an earlier stint with the federal government, Bagenstos was an appointee in the U.S. Department of Justice, where he served as the principal deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights. He worked on the 2010 Americans with Disabilities Act regulations update and led the government's enforcement of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Olmstead v. L.C., which guarantees people with disabilities the right to live and receive services in the most integrated setting appropriate.
Kuranz, professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences and of applied physics, is an experimental plasma physicist and studies high-energy-density plasmas at major laser facilities, including the National Ignition Facility and the Omega Laser Facility.
Since 2019, Kuranz has served on the Department of Energy's Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee, the nation's primary advisory body guiding federal fusion energy research. She co-led the community planning process for the Fusion Energy Sciences Long-Range Strategic Plan, which set national research priorities for the next decade and informed federal investment strategies.
Her leadership also has been central to high-level reports for National Science Foundation and Department of Energy, including workshops on plasma science facilities, basic plasma science user facilities, measurement innovation, inertial fusion energy, plasma astrophysics and high-energy-density laboratory plasma needs.
Written by Greta Guest, U-M News
