Mary Pattillo is the Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and African American Studies, and Chair of the African American Studies Department, at Northwestern University. Her areas of research include race and inequality, housing, urban politics, education reform, criminal legal studies, and stratification within the Black community. She is the author of two award-winning books – Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City (University of Chicago Press, 2007) – that focus on class stratification, public housing, education, crime, urban planning, community organizing, and youth culture in African American neighborhoods in Chicago. She is co-editor of Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration (Russell Sage, 2004). Pattillo has won awards, grants and fellowships from the Ford, Fulbright-Hays, Fulbright, George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard, Spencer, and MacArthur Foundations. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Political & Social Science. She was named among 11 Black Urbanists Every Planner Should Know by Planning magazine, and listed on The ZORA Canon: The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written by African American Women. Pattillo is currently doing research on the advantages of being Black. She sits on the Board of Trustees of the W.T. Grant Foundation and Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts, and was a founding board member of Urban Prep Charter Academies in Chicago. Pattillo holds a BA in Urban Studies from Columbia University and an MA and PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago.