Matthew Desmond
Professor of Sociology, Princeton University & Founder, The Eviction Lab
Matt is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. After receiving his PhD in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he joined the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow.
Matt is the author of four books, including Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. The principal investigator of The Eviction Lab, Matt’s research focuses on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality, and ethnography.
Matt is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award. A Contributing Writer for the New York Times Magazine, he was listed in 2016 among the Politico 50, as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.”