Sudhir Venkatesh

Sudhir Venkatesh was born in India and attended high school outside of San Diego, California. As he discusses in Gang Leader for a Day, his parents encouraged him to pursue a career in the “hard sciences,” and he majored in mathematics at UC-San Diego. He then switched, however, to sociology, and accepted a fellowship in the doctoral program at the University of Chicago, a department famed for its influential depictions of life in cities, and for its often quantitative emphasis (on, for example, demographic and economic statistics of communities under study). Venkatesh began observing communities in the poor, predominantly African-American South Side of the city under the direction of Professor William Wilson, an important figure in American sociology. Venkatesh’s academic struggles as a doctoral student, his budding research, and his attempts to reconcile the demands of that research with other aspects of his life make up the plot of Gang Leader for a Day, a memoir that accompanies his dissertation on urban poverty and off-the-books economies. Venkatesh was, until recently, a tenured professor and prominent sociologist at Columbia University. He now works at Facebook Research (a part of the technology company), where he analyzes “human-computer interaction.”