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.
History of Employment
Position
Division
Organization
Start
End
Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Service, Business and Sociology
Wagner School of Public Service
New York University
2020
2020
Vice President
Inclusive Economies & Markets
Ford Foundation
2014
2019
Professor of Sociology and Planning
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2011
2013
Associate Director
General Government Programs
Office of Management and Budget, The White House
2009
2011
Associate Department Head
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2005
2009
Assistant to Associate Professor
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
1996
2004
MLK Visiting Professor
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2001
2002
Acting Assistant Secretary
Office of Policy Development & Research
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
1998
2000
Lecturer
School of Management and Urban Policy
New School for Social Research
1996
1996
Senior Advisor
Freedman Consulting, LLC
2020
Senior Fellow
Brookings Metro
Brookings Institution
2021
Visiting Fellow, SNF Agora Institute
The Johns Hopkins University
2021
Senior Fellow
The Brookings Institution
2021