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.

She recently coauthored with sociologist Jason Houle, A Dream Defaulted: The Student Debt Crisis Among Black Borrowers (Harvard Education Press, 2022) that centers the stories of Black young adults within the broader student loan debt landscape and addresses policy solutions which can address racial disparities in student loan debt. 

Dr. Addo currently serves on the Academic Research Council of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is an elected board member of the National Economic Association and Council for Contemporary Families. She is also a faculty fellow with the Carolina Population Center, Institute for Research on Poverty, and Cook Center for Social Equity.  She also co-directs the American Economic Association’s Mentoring Program.

 Prior to joining UNC-Chapel Hill, 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.

Dr. Addo was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and is the daughter of a Ghanaian immigrant and a proud Black mother whose parents migrated to NYC from Virginia and North Carolina during the late 1940s. She loves so many things, but especially enjoys travel, food and wine, dessert, 90’s hip hop and R&B, and the arts.