Sudhir Venkatesh

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh (born in 1966) is an American sociologist and urban ethnographer. He is William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology & African-American Studies at Columbia University, a position he has held since 1999. Venkatesh has studied gangs and underground economies, public housing, advertising, and technology in his work. As of 2018, he is the Director of Signal: The Tech & Society Lab at Columbia University.

Venkatesh is the author of the book Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes To The Streets, published by Penguin Press in 2008. Venkatesh is also the host of Sudhir Breaks the Internet, a podcast published by Freakonomics Radio Network. Additionally, Venkatesh is a public writer and documentary filmmaker and has held positions on Facebook and Twitter.

Raised in Irvine, California, Venkatesh received a B.A. in mathematics from the University of California, San Diego, in 1988. Venkatesh describes his switch from mathematics to sociology in graduate school as a result of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago's inner-city neighborhoods. In 1997, he earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Professor William Julius Wilson, focusing on the Robert Taylor Homes, a housing project in Chicago.

In September 2011, Venkatesh was featured on Freakonomics Radio episode 42, "The Upside of Quitting." Venkatesh was also a Freakonomics blog contributor in 2008, authoring a nine-part blog series titled "What Do Real Thugs Think of The Wire," in which he reported on the experience of watching episodes of popular crime drama television series The Wire with gang members he knew through his research. In 2021, he began hosting the podcast Sudhir Breaks the Internet, which focuses on the tech industry, particularly social media companies.

Venkatesh is William B. Ransford's Professor of Sociology & African-American Studies at Columbia University, a continuously held position since 1999. He was awarded the National Science Foundation NSF CAREER award in 2000. From 1996 to 1999, Venkatesh was elected as a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.

Since 2013, Venkatesh has been writing about the advertising industry in academic journals and the popular press. His current research examines the strategies platforms use to handle negative behavior. Venkatesh served as the Academic Director of the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, a global Executive MBA program for the advertising industry, from 2011-2012. As of 2018, Venkatesh is also currently a Co-Director of the Social Media Governance Initiative, a joint effort between the SIGNAL Lab at Columbia University and Yale University's Justice Collaboratory with the goal of ensuring that digital technologies foster healthy online interaction.

Fast Company, an American business magazine, has published four articles by Venkatesh on the topics of advertising and technology: "Thinking Small: 3 Ways To Remain Creative In A World Of Big Data", "Can Advertising Bring Back The Rust Belt?", "How To Use Conflict To Unlock Creativity," and "The Science Of Awards: Your Data-Driven Guide To Winning At Cannes."