Ken Kolb, PhD

Community-based researcher & public policy scholar

Ken Kolb and a community member standing face to face on the Hampton Ave Bridge

About Ken Kolb, PhD

Ken Kolb, PhD, is a professor and chair of sociology at Furman University in Greenville, SC

Ken Kolb is an expert on social inequality, community development, and pragmatic solutions to persistent social problems.

For the past 20 years, Kolb has been conducting community-based research, analyzing social problems with the goal of proposing practical solutions that harness readily available resources.

His first book, Moral Wages: The Emotional Dilemmas of Victim Advocacy and Counseling, was published in 2014, and his second book, Retail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate, was published in 2022.

Ken is passionate about engaging in meaningful, fact-based research that informs smart and equitable policy decisions.

Awards, Recognitions & Memberships

Recent Work

Books by Ken Kolb, PhD

  • Retail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate

    Retail Inequality examines the failure of recent efforts to improve Americans' diets by increasing access to healthy food. But the battle over food deserts was never about food—it was about equality.

  • Moral Wages: The Emotional Dilemmas of Victim Advocacy and Counseling

    Moral Wages offers the reader a vivid depiction of what it is like to work inside an agency that assists victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.

  • “Ken’s work was absolutely essential to the Greenville News project…It was a great illustration of how academic research can reach out from campus and have a ripple effect across the entire community.”

    – Fred Clasen-Kelly, Senior Correspondent, KFF Health News

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