Camille Zubrinsky Charles is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology and Education, at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Won’t You Be My Neighbor: Race, Class and Residence in Los Angeles (Russell Sage, Fall 2006), which examines class-and race-based explanations for persisting residential segregation by race. She is also co-author of The Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America’s Selective Colleges and Universities (2003, Princeton University Press). More recently, she is co-author of Taming the River: Negotiating the Academic, Financial, and Social Currents in Selective Colleges and Universities (2009, Princeton University Press), the second in a series based on The National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen, and “Race in the American Mind: From the Moynihan Report to the Obama Candidacy”.

Professor Charles earned her Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was a project manager for the 1992-1994 Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality. Her research interests are in the areas of urban inequality, racial attitudes and intergroup relations, racial residential segregation, minorities in higher education, and racial identity; her work has appeared in Social Forces, Social Problems, Social Science Research, The DuBois Review, the American Journal of Education and the Annual Review of Sociology.

Alexis McGill Johnson is the Executive Director of the American Values Institute, a consortium of researchers, educators, and social justice advocates focused on understanding the role of bias in our society. Previously she served as Executive Director of Citizen Change, a national nonprofit organization founded by Sean “P. Diddy” Combs to educate, motivate, and empower young eligible voters. Under Combs, she launched the Vote or Die! campaign, creating a new political model for reaching young people and people of color by mixing traditional grassroots mobilization with nontraditional consumer-based marketing methods. As a writer, political strategist, and organizer, she has explored shifting paradigms of identity politics in the post-civil rights era, worked to increase civic engagement among young African Americans, and investigated the implications for demographic and ideological changes of this constituency on national politics. She serves as a private consultant to a variety of organizations, donors, and artists.

Professor john a. powell is an internationally recognized authority in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties and a wide range of issues including race, structural racism, ethnicity, housing, poverty and democracy. He is Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University and he holds the Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights & Civil Liberties at the University’s Michael E. Moritz College of Law. Professor powell has written extensively on a number of issues including structural racism, racial justice and regionalism, concentrated poverty and urban sprawl, opportunity based housing, voting rights, affirmative action in the United States, South Africa and Brazil, racial and ethnic identity, spirituality and social justice, and the needs of citizens in a democratic society. Professor powell has worked and lived in Africa, where he was a consultant to the governments of Mozambique and South Africa. He has also lived and worked in India and done work in South America and Europe. He is one of the co‐founders of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council and serves on the board of several national organizations. Professor powell has taught at numerous law schools including Harvard and Columbia University. He joined the faculty at The Ohio State University in 2002.

Jacob Faber graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006 with Master's degrees in Telecommunications Policy and Urban Studies and Planning and in 2004 with a Bachelor's degree in Management Science. Since 2003, Jacob's studies and research interests have included the digital divide, broadband availability in low-income neighborhoods, how Internet technologies encourage community involvement and political participation, and regional strategies for inner city economic growth.

Since joining CSI in 2006, Jacob has provided research support through data analysis and methodology development on a range of projects. Jacob is responsible for CSI's "opportunity mapping" – a powerful tool for understanding the geographic distribution of opportunities (jobs, housing, infrastructure, etc.). Jacob developed the Opportunity Index for the New York Region, which aggregates dozens of variables to measure wellbeing on the neighborhood level. As project lead for CSI’s Communications Testing, Jacob helps develop testing methodologies for reframing the public conversation on race to build public will for racial justice policies. Jacob has also produced several reports exploring how different communities are experiencing the current economic downturn.