Day 1 Speaker

Xavier ‘Xav’ de Souza Briggs is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC and senior advisor and co-founder of What Works Plus, a collaborative of leading philanthropic donors promoting opportunity through America’s generational investments in infrastructure and economic development, including manufacturing. An award-winning educator and researcher, former professor at Harvard and MIT, he is also an experienced adviser on inclusive economic development and leader in philanthropy and government.

His work at Brookings has focused on inclusive markets, good jobs, responding to extreme weather, and making government more nimble and effective. He has helped catalyze public conversation about: generative AI and the future of work and workers; how big federal bets on “new industrial policy” can generate real and lasting economic benefits for the workers and communities that need it most.

A board member at JUST Capital, Xav is the author of three books, two of them national book of the year award winners. His writing and views have appeared in the New York Times, TIME, Boston Globe, CNN, Fortune, Fast Company, and other media, in English and in Spanish.

Prior to joining Brookings, Briggs served for six years as vice president of the Ford Foundation, redesigning and managing its inclusive economies and markets work globally, along with regional program teams based in China, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. He led the foundation’s efforts to develop an actionable framework for understanding and challenging the drivers of inequality in our world, and also to build the field of impact investing and commit $1 billion of endowment assets, the largest-ever for a private foundation, for that purpose. He earned an engineering degree at Stanford, an MPA at Harvard, and Ph.D. at Columbia University.