Rinku Sen is the President and Executive Director of the Applied Research Center (ARC) and Publisher of ColorLines magazine.  She started her organizing career as a student activist at Brown University, fighting race, gender and class discrimination on campuses. She received a B.A. in Women’s Studies from Brown University in 1988 and an M.S. in Journalism at Columbia University (2005). She has written extensively about immigration, community organizing and women’s lives for a wide variety of publications including Third Force, AlterNet, tompaine.com, Race, Poverty & the Environment, Amerasia Journal and Colorlines. She edited We are the Ones We Are Waiting For: Women of Color Organizing for Transformation, published by the Urban Rural Missions of the World Council of Churches in 1995. She has been the principal investigator on research projects for the Ford and Ms. foundations. Her latest book, Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing (Jossey-Bass) was released in the fall of 2003. In 2004, Rinku was honored with the Asian American Journalists Association Dr. Suzanne J. Ahn Award for social justice coverage.

From 1988-2000, Rinku was on the staff of the Center for Third World Organizing (CTWO), a national network of organizations of color. As a staff member, then Co-Director, she trained new organizers of color and crafted public policy campaigns around poverty, education, racial and gender equity, health care and immigration issues. She is a board member of the Schott Foundation for Public Education and on the advisory board of the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity. She is formerly a member of the board of Independent Press Association, the Tides Center and the Center for Third World Organizing. She was recognized by Ms. Magazine as one of 21 feminists to watch in the 21st century in 1996, the same year that she received the Ms. Foundation for Women's Gloria Steinem Women of Vision award. She was a Gerbode Fellow in 1999, and was a 2004 Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York.