Matthew Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University as well as the Founding Director and Principal Investigator of The Eviction Lab. He is the author of five books: Poverty, by America (2023), Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), The Racial Order (with Mustafa Emirbayer, 2015), On the Fireline: Living and Dying with WIldland Firefighters (2007), and Race in America (with Mustafa Emirbayer, 2015). Desmond is a Contributing Writer for The New York Times Magazine, and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The Washington Post, among many other publications. 

Desmond's primary teaching and research interests include urban sociology, poverty, race and ethnicity, organizations and work, social theory, and ethnography. 

In 2015, Desmond was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for “revealing the impact of eviction on the lives of the urban poor and its role in perpetuating racial and economic inequality.” He received the 2018 Stowe Prize for Writing to Advance Social Justice, awarded by the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center to authors whose work shines a light on critical social issues. In 2016, Desmond was named one of the Politico 50, one of "fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate." 

In 2018, Desmond’s Eviction Lab at Princeton University published the first-ever dataset of more than 80 million American eviction records. The Lab currently is pursuing nearly a dozen lines of inquiry analyzing this groundbreaking dataset that will help scholars, policymakers, and advocates better understand eviction, housing insecurity, and poverty. 

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