Matthew Desmond is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and the principal investigator of The Eviction Lab. He is the author of several books, including Poverty, by America (2023) and Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Carnegie Medal and the PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. Desmond's research focuses on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality and ethnography. He has received 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, Desmond was included in 2016 in the Politico 50 list, as one of the "fifty people across the country who most influence the national political debate."