Mary K Roberts

Mary K. Roberts is a quantitative sociologist and social demographer whose research examines how structural forces and social institutions shape patterns in population health and mortality. She is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Demographic Science Unit's Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science in Oxford Population Health and a Non-Stipendiary Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Mary works on Professor Jennifer Dowd’s MORTAL project, contributing expertise in demographic methods, social stratification, and health disparities.

Mary’s research focuses on three central areas: social and structural determinants of kidney health; how social and formal institutions reproduce health inequality through mechanisms of structural racism, selection processes, and resource allocation; and how social and environmental factors become biologically embedded through pathways such as the gut microbiome, linking social conditions to physiological processes and chronic disease. Her work spans medical sociology, population health, demography, kidney disease and transplantation, biosocial processes, and quantitative methodology.

She received her Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography, along with a Graduate Certificate in Quantitative Methodology, from The Pennsylvania State University in 2024. Her dissertation, The Physical Cost of Soldiering On, evaluated age-period-cohort effects of military service on morbidity, cause-specific mortality, and potential explanatory mechanisms. Mary’s peer-reviewed publications appear in Social Science & Medicine, Kidney Medicine, Progress in Transplantation, Transplant Immunology, and Clinical Transplantation, among others. Her research has also been presented at leading conferences including the Population Association of America, the World Transplant Congress, the American Society of Nephrology, and the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science.