NYU Wagner Welcomes Laura Kavanaugh as Distinguished Visiting Urbanist

Laura Kavanaugh, who served as the 34th New York City Fire Commissioner, has been named the NYU Wagner Distinguished Visiting Urbanist for the 2025–26 academic year. Each year, Wagner appoints a renowned professional in urban policy to guest-teach a course for Wagner students and serve as a resource through sharing their experiences in the field. Kavanaugh will teach a course on Topics in Urbanism during the Spring 2026 semester. 

As the first woman to serve as New York City Fire Commissioner and the youngest in over a century, Kavanaugh oversaw the nation’s largest fire department, with 17,000 employees, a $2.3 billion budget and 1.6 million yearly 911 calls.  During her tenure, Kavanaugh worked to make the agency more efficient, navigating through a global pandemic, fiscal crises, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters. 

Kavanaugh’s public service career spans nearly two decades. She first served as a public affairs consultant on local, congressional, mayoral, and presidential campaigns before becoming a senior advisor in the Mayor’s Office. She rose through the ranks in FDNY for nearly a decade before taking on the role of commissioner. 

Throughout her career, she has garnered a reputation as someone who is not afraid to take on some of the toughest challenges and find solutions, working on some of New York’s most complex public policy issues, such as universal pre-K, congestion pricing, and mental health response. She’s considered an expert in government efficiency, public health, workplace discrimination, robotics and drones, and disaster response and recovery.

Kavanaugh holds a B.A. from Whittier College and an MPA from Columbia University.