Tressie McMillan Cottom, PhD is an associate professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life (UNC). Professor Cottom’s research spans higher education, work, race, class, gender and digital societies. Lower Ed (2016) is her critically-acclaimed work on for-profit higher education and social inequality and THICK: And Other Essays (2019) was a non-fiction finalist for the National Book Awards. Among many other awards, she is the 2020 recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Sociology for Public Understanding of Sociology career award. She hosts a culture podcast with Roxane Gay, Hear to Slay, and lives in Chapel Hill, NC.