Mary L. Gray is Senior Principal Researcher at M
icrosoft Research and Faculty Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She maintains a faculty position in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering with affiliations in Anthropology and Gender Studies at Indiana University. Mary, an anthropologist and media scholar by training, focuses on how people’s everyday uses of technologies transform labor, identity, and human rights. Mary earned her PhD in Communication from the University of California at San Diego in 2004, under the direction of Susan Leigh Star. In 2020, Mary was named a MacArthur Fellow for her contributions to anthropology and the study of technology, digital economies, and society.
Mary’s work includes In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth (1999) and Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (2009), which looked at how young people in rural Southeast Appalachia use media to negotiate identity, local belonging, and connections to broader, imagined queer communities. The book won the American Anthropological Association’s Ruth Benedict Prize and the American Sociological Association’s Sexualities Studies Book Award in 2009. And, with Colin Johnson and Brian Gilley, Mary co-edited Queering the Countryside: New Directions in Rural Queer Studies (2016), a 2016 Choice Academic Title.
In 2019, Mary co-authored (with computer scientist Siddharth Suri), Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass. The book chronicles workers’ experiences of on-demand information service jobs—from content moderation and data-labeling to telehealth—work that is essential to the global growth of artificial intelligence and platform economies more broadly. It was named a Financial Times’ Critic’s Pick and awarded the McGannon Center for Communication Research Book Prize in 2019. The book was also awarded the 2020 Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS) Book Award Honorable Mention. The book has been translated into Korean and Chinese.
Mary chairs the Microsoft Research Ethics Review Program—the only federally-registered institutional review board of its kind in Tech. She is recognized as a leading expert in the emerging field of AI and ethics, particularly research at the intersections of computer and social sciences. She sits on the editorial boards of Cultural Anthropology, Television and New Media, the International Journal of Communication, and Social Media + Society. Mary’s research has been covered by popular press venues, including The Guardian, El Pais, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Nature, The Economist, Harvard Business Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Forbes Magazine. She served on the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association and was the Association’s Section Assembly Convenor from 2006-2010 as well as the co-chair of the Association’s 113th Annual Meeting. Mary currently sits on several boards, including the California Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors, Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIM&R), and Stanford University’s One-Hundred-Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100) Standing Committee, commissioned to reflect on the future of AI and recommend directions for its policy implications.