“In college, when I was kind of confronted with facts and figures about inequality in America, a big impulse I had was to go hang out with homeless people around my university and hear them out and understand their situation from their perspective.”

American sociologist

Matthew Desmond is an American sociologist and professor at Princeton University. He is known for his work on housing, poverty, and inequality, and for leading the Eviction Lab there. At Princeton, he serves as the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology and as principal investigator of the Eviction Lab. He was formerly the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.