Xavier de Souza Briggs

Xavier (Xav) de Souza Briggs is a senior fellow at Brookings Metro. He is also a senior advisor and co-founder of What Works Plus, a collaborative of philanthropic donors promoting equity and resilience through America’s generational investments in infrastructure and climate action, and senior advisor to Freedman Consulting, LLC, a mission-driven consulting firm focused on public-interest projects, including What Works Plus. An award-winning educator and researcher, he is also an experienced leader in philanthropy and government. Known for his wide range of interests and track record of building and reshaping fields, Briggs is an expert on economic opportunity and inclusive growth, racial equity and pluralism, housing, urban and regional development, and democratic governance in the U.S. and abroad. Briggs has testified before Congress on several of these topics. An elected member of the National Academy of Public Administration, he holds an engineering degree from Stanford University, an MPA from Harvard, and a PhD in sociology and education from Columbia University and was a visiting graduate fellow at the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil.