Ben Crow is a Professor of Sociology specialising in international development at the University of California Santa Cruz. He is the author of books including Markets, Class and Social Change, Sharing the Ganges, The Third World Atlas, The Food Question and The Atlas of Global Inequalities. He started the online UC Atlas of Global Inequality built by a group of students, faculty, and staff.

His main research is currently on gender and the social dynamics of access to water in the global South. He taught at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and the Open University (UK) before joining UC Santa Cruz. He was a political activist in East Pakistan / Bangladesh, a journalist in London and an engineer in Kenya, Tanzania and Botswana before he became an academic. He has a B.Sc. in Civil Engineering from the Polytechnic of Central London and a Ph.D. from Edinburgh University.