Matthew Desmond is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he joined the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow. He 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, Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.

Yannis M. Ioannides holds the Max and Herta Neubauer Chair in Economics at Tufts University. His research interests combine social economics and inequality, macroeconomics, and social interactions and urban structure on a world scale.