Dr. Mary-Kathryn Adams

Mary-Kathryn (MK) leads the business to deliver its strategic mission – working with organisations to help them conceptualise, embed and measure the impact they hope to achieve. MK focuses on strategy development, business planning and innovation, leading on stakeholder and partner engagement through our key collaborations. She has worked with high profile clients across different sectors, developing frameworks and tools to enable them to operationalise social value.

MK joined Simetrica-Jacobs from HACT, where she was the Deputy Chief Executive. In addition to business-wide strategic leadership and business planning, she led major projects and brokered partnerships between housing, research, technology and data and played a key role in leading HACT’s work on social value. She also established the UK Housing Data Standards partnership with OSCRE International in 2017.

In 2021, MK was also appointed as a Non Executive Director to the Board of Abri Group, a housing provider with a portfolio of 40k properties operating in the south of England.  She also sits on the Audit and Risk Committee of Abri Group.

With over ten years of experience investigating the intersection of evidence, policy and practice in the UK, she has an extensive background in qualitative research methods and in mixed methods research in applied contexts. MK holds a first class degree in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an MA in Irish Studies (Social Anthropology) and a PhD in Social Anthropology from Queen’s University, Belfast.