Robert Adams Jr. is the Chief Operating Officer at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, GA. Previously, he served as a Program Officer at The Fetzer Institute, a private operating foundation in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  He is an education policy specialist and advocate who holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from The University of Texas at Austin.  He has conducted extensive research in the area of education reform and equity in the United States and abroad, including Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa. 

Adams has taught and directed research projects at DePaul University, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. During the fall of 2008, he was Fulbright scholar at the Catholic University of São Paulo in Brazil.  His research articles and reviews have appeared in African and Black Diaspora, Anthropology News, American Ethnologist, Identities, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, and Transforming Anthropology.