Dr. Chinyere Osuji grew up on the Northside of Chicago in low-income housing. Surrounded by African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and immigrants from Africa and all over Latin America, she was fascinated by the ways that people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds interacted with one another. She witnessed how people across ethnoracial categories worked together to convert their HUD housing into a co-op of affordable housing in a neighborhood of rising costs.In college, she found that sociology provided a way to understand social life and interactions across ethnoracial groups. As a result, she earned a bachelor's degree in sociology and Spanish at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Studying abroad in Granada, Spain for a year led Dr. Osuji to the realization that African immigrants were everywhere. She went back to Spain on a Fulbright to understand the lives of African immigrants in Barcelona.Upon earning a master's degree in sociology at Harvard University, she decided to shift gears and study race relations in Brazil, the nation with the second largest number of people of African descent. After earning a PhD in sociology at UCLA, Dr. Osuji became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Africana Studies. She is now an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers-Camden.