Dr. Xavier Briggs

Xavier (Xav) de Souza Briggs is a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution and, for 2021-2022, a visiting fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He is an expert on economic opportunity and inclusive growth, racial equity and pluralism, housing, urban and regional development, budgeting and democratic governance in the U.S. and abroad. An award-winning educator and researcher, he is also an experienced manager in philanthropy and government.

Xav edited The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in America, which won planning’s top book award, asnd authored Democracy as Problem Solving, a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Prize for best scholarly book on a social problem, and Moving to Opportunity: The Story of an American Experiment to Fight Ghetto Poverty, winner of NAPA’s Louis Brownlow Award.

In 2020, he was Distinguished Visiting Professor of Business, Public Service and Sociology at New York University and a volunteer on the Biden-Harris Transition Team.

Prior to joining Brookings, he served for six years as vice president of The Ford Foundation, a professor at MIT and Harvard, and program associate director in the White House Office of Management and Budget.

He serves on the boards of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, Demos, the Global Impact Investing Network, JUST Capital, and One Fair Wage. Xav holds an engineering degree from Stanford, an MPA from Harvard, and a PhD from Columbia University.