Mary Kathleen Zimmerman is a Professor Emerita with the Deparment of Population Health and an adjunct Professor Emerita with the Department of Sociology at the University of Kansas. She was born November 23, 1953.

Zimmerman completed her BA in sociology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1967 before completing her MA and Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 1971 and 1976, respectively. She completed a National Institute of Health (NIH) postdoctoral fellowship in epidemiology in 1977, culiminating in her research project "Prevalence of High Blood Pressure in Employed Women in Relation to Job Level.”

She worked as an instructor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls from 1972-1974 before moving on to teach at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, Missouri (UMKC) in 1975. Zimmerman joined the KU School of Medicine in 1976 as an adjunct instructor, and became a full professor with the Deparmtnet of Health Policy and Management in 1999. She became a full professor with the Department of Population Health in 2020.

Zimmerman has published 46 articles and two books, Passage Through Abortion: The Personal and Social Reality of Women's Experiences (1977) and Global Dimensions of Gender and Carework (2006, with Jacqueline Litt and Christine Bose). In 1989, she was awarded a Fulbright Research Fellowship and worked with the University of Helsinki and the Finnish Insitute of Occupational Health to examine welfare state support for the families of children with cancer. She was also the Joy McCann Professor of Women in Science and Medicine with KU's School of Medicine from 2013-2016.

Zimmerman's research interests have focused in comparative health systems and social policies; gender and social inequality; women's health; medical sociology; and research methods for health services.

[Information taken from collection materials, University Archives "Mary Kathleen Zimmerman" morgue file, the KU Department of Sociology faculty page (https://www.kumc.edu/mzimmerman.html) and KU Medical Center faculty page (https://www.kumc.edu/mzimmerman.html).]