Based on over a decade of research, Dr. Victor Rios created Project GRIT (Generating Resilience to Inspire Transformation) a human development program that works with educators to refine leadership, civic engagement and personal and academic empowerment in young people placed at-risk.

Rios is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. in comparative ethnic studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005. His book Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys discusses the many ways in which young urban males of color encounter the youth control complex: a ubiquitous system of punitive social control embedded in what has come to be known as the school-to-prison pipeline.