Mary L. Gray

Timeline

1. 1992–2004

   Anthropology and a UCSD doctorate

   She earns a BA in anthropology and Native American studies at the University of California, Davis in 1992 and an MA in anthropology at San Francisco State University in 1999. Her master's thesis on queer youth narratives becomes the subject of her first book, In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth (1999). In 2004, she completes a PhD in communication at UC San Diego under the direction of Susan Leigh Star.

2. 2004–2009

   Out in the Country at Indiana

   She joins the faculty of Indiana University in 2004. Her 2009 book Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America studies how queer young people in rural Southeast Appalachia use digital media to negotiate identity and find community. In 2009, the book wins the American Anthropological Association's Ruth Benedict Prize and the American Sociological Association's Sexualities Studies Book Award.

3. 2012–2015

   Microsoft Research and Berkman Klein

   She becomes affiliated with Microsoft Research in 2012. In September 2015, as a senior researcher there, she joins Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society as a fellow and plans summits that bring researchers and digital workers together on policy for crowdwork.

4. 2019

   Ghost Work with Siddharth Suri

   In 2019, she and computer scientist Siddharth Suri publish Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass, about the on-demand workers who moderate content, label data and do other tasks that AI systems depend on. Built on thousands of surveys and interviews with workers in the United States and India, the book traces what she calls the “paradox of automation’s last mile.” It wins the McGannon Center for Communication Research Book Prize in 2019.

5. 2020–2021

   MacArthur Fellow and AI100 member

   In February 2020, she is named to California Governor Gavin Newsom's Council of Economic Advisors. The MacArthur Foundation names her a 2020 fellow for investigating how labor, identity, and human rights are transformed by the digital economy. She serves on the Standing Committee of Stanford's One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence for its 2021 report, Gathering Strength, Gathering Storms.

6. 2021–2022

   The Banality of Scale

   In 2021, she gives a NeurIPS invited talk, “The Banality of Scale: A Theory on the Limits of Modeling Bias and Fairness Frameworks for Social Justice,” which applies design justice principles to community-based organizations serving Black and Latinx communities in North Carolina. In September 2022, she is a Rockefeller Foundation resident at Bellagio, where she works on her book Banality of Scale: An Anthropologist’s Fieldguide to the Future of Computing.

7. By 2025

   Project Resolve in North Carolina

   As a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, she works on Project Resolve, a collaboration with four North Carolina community-based organizations that builds the Healthy Community Hub, a digital resource for health equity. In May 2025, she presents Project Resolve at Boston University as a longitudinal case study of AI innovation built with community-based organizations.

8. As of October 2026

   Founding the Resolve Institute

   She spends nearly 15 years as a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, where she founds and for more than a decade chairs the Microsoft Research IRB and Ethics Review Program, a federally registered institutional review board. She then founds The Resolve Institute, a public benefit corporation dedicated to secure, community-driven AI. As of October 2026, she is principal investigator of Project Resolve, a visiting research affiliate at MIT, a faculty associate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center and a faculty member in Indiana University's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering.