Dr. William A. Darity Jr. is an economist and social sciences researcher whose work focuses on group-based inequality, especially with respect to race and ethnicity. He is best known for his 2005 paper in the Journal of Economics and Finance, which established him as the "founder of stratification economics." He has also been described as "perhaps the country’s leading scholar on the economics of racial inequality." Currently, he is Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics at Duke University, and the Director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University.Previously, Darity he was Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of North Carolina. He is also a former president of the National Economic Association (1986), the Southern Economic Association (1996), and the Association of Black Sociologists (2015-2017).Darity Jr. received his B.A. in Economics and Political Science from Brown University and his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.