Fenaba Rena Addo is an associate professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill. She is a nationally recognized scholar on debt and racial wealth inequality.

She has written extensively on various issues concerning racial economic inequality in the United States with a focus on higher education and family and relationships. Her work on racial disparities in student debt, older Black women and wealth, the Black Middle Class, and the Millennial wealth gap, sheds light on the ways that societal inequalities stem from policies of racial exclusion and discrimination, and how they get reproduced over time.

Prior to joining UNC-CH, Dr. Addo was the Lorna Jorgensen Wendt Associate Professor of Money, Relationships, and Equality (MORE) in the School of Human Ecology’s Department of Consumer Science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Dr. Addo earned her Ph.D. in Policy Analysis and Management from Cornell University, holds a B.S. in Economics from Duke University, and was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Postdoctoral Scholar.

She currently serves on the board of the National Economic Association and Council for Contemporary Families and is a faculty fellow with the Carolina Population Center, Institute for Research on Poverty, Cook Center for Social Equity, and Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.