BOSTON The Boston-based Ruderman Family Foundation awarded Harvard University professor Michael Stein with its first Morton E. Ruderman Award in Inclusion.
The $100,000 award announced this week recognizes an individual who has made an extraordinary contribution to the inclusion of people with disabilities in the Jewish world and the greater public, and awards the potential for future contributions.
Stein, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, is co-founder and executive director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, or HPOD.
An internationally recognized expert on disability rights, Stein participated in the drafting of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and consults with international governments on their disability laws and policies, according to the foundation.
HPOD has been privileged to serve people with disabilities and their representative organizations in some forty countries, and I have been personally inspired, humbled, and energized by working with these advocates, Stein said in a statement.
Martha Minow, dean of the Harvard Law School, called Steins work in disability law truly groundbreaking.
Since co-founding HPOD as a global disability and policy center, he has influenced agencies and governments around the world, including the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which recently relied extensively on his arguments in a landmark decision on the voting rights of persons with intellectual disabilities, Minow said. He is thoroughly deserving of this recognition.
