Mary L. Gray is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research.
She maintains a faculty position in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering with affiliations in Anthropology and Gender Studies at Indiana University. Gray, an anthropologist and media scholar by training, focuses on how people’s everyday uses of technologies transform labor, identity, and human rights. Gray 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.
Gray currently sits or has served on several boards, including the American Anthropological Association, California Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors, Data Nutrition Project, 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. In 2020, Gray was named a MacArthur Fellow for her contributions to anthropology and the study of technology, digital economies, and society. Gray earned her PhD in Communication, under the direction of Susan Leigh Star, from the University of California at San Diego in 2004.
