He is an associate professor of social sciences and co-director of the Justice and Poverty Project. After his PhD in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he joined the Harvard Fellowship Society as a junior member. His main teaching and research interests include the urban sociology, poverty, race and ethnicity, organizations and work, social theory and ethnography.

Desmond is the author of four books: On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters (2007), Race in America (with Mustafa Emirbayer, 2015), The Racial Order (2015, also with Emirbayer) and Evicted (2016). He is the editor of the inaugural issue of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, volumes 1 and 2: Severe Deprivation in America (2015), and has written numerous essays on educational inequality, workplace risks, political ideology , race and social theory, and the housing market of large urban centers. He has recently published in the American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review some works on the consequences of evictions and survival strategies on the lower scale of the rental market, based on social networks made up of the poorest population, and on the consequences for women of the new crime control policies.