Dr Mary-Kathryn Adams

Mary-Kathryn (MK) leads and delivers the company's strategic mission: helping organisations conceptualise, embed and measure the impact they want to achieve. Her role focuses on strategy development, business planning and innovation, as well as leading stakeholder and partner engagement through the company’s key collaborations.

She has worked with high-profile clients across a range of sectors, developing frameworks and tools that enable organisations to operationalise social value. She has more than ten years’ experience exploring the relationship between evidence, policy and practice in the UK, with particular expertise in qualitative and mixed-methods research in applied settings.

Before joining Simetrica-Jacobs, MK was Deputy Chief Executive at HACT, where she led business-wide strategy and planning, major projects and partnerships across housing, research, technology and data. She also played a central role in HACT’s social value work and established the UK Housing Data Standards partnership with OSCRE International in 2017. She is a Non-Executive Director of Abri Group and sits on its Audit and Risk Committee. She holds a first-class degree in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an MA in Irish Studies and a PhD in Social Anthropology from Queen’s University Belfast.