Professor john a. powell is an internationally recognized authority in the areas of civil rights, civil liberties, and issues relating to race, ethnicity, poverty, and the law. He is the executive director UC Berkeley’s Haas Diversity Research Center and the former executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. He also holds the Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Moritz College of Law.

Professor powell has taught at Columbia University School of Law, Harvard Law School, University of Miami School of Law, American University, the University of San Francisco School of Law, and the University of Minnesota Law School.

He joined the faculty at Ohio State in 2002. He has written extensively on a number of issues including racial justice and regionalism, concentrated poverty and urban sprawl, the link between housing and school segregation, opportunity-based housing, gentrification, disparities in the criminal justice system, voting rights, affirmative action in the United States, South Africa and Brazil, racial and ethnic identity and current demographic trends. He 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 Europe and South America.