News Story

As the 16th president of the University of Michigan, Domenico Grasso joins a lineage of leaders dating to the 1800s.

The Board of Regents named Grasso the 16th president after Syracuse University Chancellor Kent Syverud, who was expected to become Michigan’s next leader, announced last week that he could not accept the job because he is battling brain cancer. The regents removed the “interim” title from Grasso and made his presidential appointment retroactive to May 2025, when they first named him to the position following the resignation of President Santa J. Ono.

“When we asked Domenico Grasso to step in and serve as president last year, he did so knowing it was the right thing to do for his university. He has now accepted the call to serve for a second time,” said Regent Carl Meyers. “We are grateful not only for his willingness to continue but also for all he has accomplished over the past year to provide stability and true leadership at a time when we needed it most.”

Michigan was founded in 1817 in Detroit and moved to Ann Arbor in 1837. In its early years, the young institution was governed by its faculty. It wasn’t until August 1852 — two years after state of Michigan voters adopted a state constitution creating the role of president of the University of Michigan — that the Board of Regents appointed Henry Philip Tappan, a philosophy professor from New York, as the first president.

Grasso is the first Michigan alumnus to serve as president since Alexander Grant Ruthven, who earned a Michigan PhD in zoology and led the university from 1929 to 1951. Grasso holds a Michigan doctorate in environmental engineering, making him the second engineer to be president; James J. Duderstadt, president from 1988 to 1996, trained as a nuclear engineer.

Grasso serves as professor of civil and environmental engineering at UM-Ann Arbor and holds a secondary appointment as professor of sustainable engineering at UM-Dearborn.

President Emerita Mary Sue Coleman, the 13th president and the only woman to hold the position, praised Grasso’s work.

“President Grasso has provided strong, stabilizing leadership this past year, and I am confident he will continue to move Michigan forward as a great research university,” Coleman said. “I am gratified to see he is being recognized as the university’s 16th president, adding to his service as chancellor of UM-Dearborn.”

Grasso is the first Michigan leader to have served as both chancellor of a regional campus and president.

Grasso has said he considers Tappan, Coleman, Duderstadt, and President James B. Angell to be iconic Michigan leaders. One of the many reasons he said he admires Angell — Michigan’s third president — is because they share roots at the University of Vermont; Angell came to Ann Arbor from the Vermont presidency, and Grasso once served as a dean of engineering and mathematical sciences and a vice president for research there.

Angell served as Michigan’s president longer than any other, from 1871 to 1909. “The life of the president of a college or university is often spoken of as a hard and trying life. A laborious life with its anxieties it is,” he wrote at the end of his career. “But I have found it a happy life. The satisfactions it has brought to me are quite beyond my deserts.”

Grasso will continue to reside with his wife, Susan, and their dog Nola, at the historic president’s residence on campus — first occupied by Tappan and his wife, Julia, and their dog, in 1852.