MIT World Speakers

Xavier de Souza Briggs

Xavier de Souza Briggs has a national reputation for his work on social capital and the ‘geography of opportunity’ – a policy and research field concerned with the consequences of segregation by race and income. He founded and directs the Community Problem-Solving Project @ MIT, a free learning space for people and institutions worldwide where they can access useful tools for problem-solving in the field. He has written The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America (Brookings Institution Press, 2005).

Prior to MIT, he taught on the public policy faculty at Harvard where he received the Kennedy School’s award for excellence in teaching in 2002. A senior policy official in the Clinton Administration from 1998 to 1999, Briggs was Acting Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. He has been an adviser to The World Bank, The Rockefeller Foundation and other groups.

Briggs received a B.S. from Stanford University’s School of Engineering, an M.P.A. from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a Ph.D. in Sociology and Education from Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.