Seleeke Flingai
Seleeke Flingai is the Policy and Research Deputy Director for the Fines and Fees Justice Center (FFJC).
Seleeke previously served as a senior research associate at the Vera Institute of Justice, where he used quantitative methods to describe how the criminal legal system has maintained or exacerbated racial and economic inequality in American society. His prior applied research work includes roles at PolicyLink, where he helped lead research engagements with community partners and developed rigorous analyses, reports, and other data tools to support community-led struggles for greater economic equity, and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (Greater Boston’s regional planning agency), where he used quantitative and spatial data to investigate the various manifestations of racialized inequities in the region, with a focus on residential displacement, housing markets, and social vulnerability. Throughout his career, he has worked alongside policymakers, leaders in grassroots organizations, and other city and regional government staff to support data-informed and historically grounded policy conversations and advocacy.
In addition to his experience as a quantitative researcher, Seleeke spent years as an educator whose teaching focused on the intersections of racism and capitalism with urban spatial processes, economic (in)equity, criminalization, and health. He recently served as an Assistant Instructional Professor at the University of Chicago’s Department of Public Health Sciences, where he taught courses on urban health, geospatial data analysis, and social inequities in health. Prior to the University of Chicago, Seleeke was a Lecturer and Senior Fellow with Penn’s Center for Public Health at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, where he taught a course exploring race, capitalism, and public health in the United States.
Seleeke earned his MPA in Domestic Policy from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. Before that, he obtained a PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and received his BS in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT.