Richard Florida is University Professor and Director of Cities at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto and a Distinguished Fellow at New York University鈥檚 Schack Institute of Real Estate. He is the author of several best sellers, including the award winning The Rise of the Creative Class. He serves as senior editor for The Atlantic, where he co-founded and serves as Editor-at-Large for CityLab. He previously taught at Carnegie Mellon, Ohio State University, and George Mason University, and has been a visiting professor at Harvard and MIT and Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He earned his Bachelor鈥檚 degree from Rutgers College and his Ph.D. from Columbia University.