Mary Schooling joined the School of Public Health at HKU in 2002 as a part-time teaching assistant after obtaining a PhD in Epidemiology from University College London (UK) following a career in IT and Operations Research starting at IBM. Mary Schooling is also a Professor at CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, City University of New York. She is an Editorial Board member of the journal PLoS ONE, an Associate Editor of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (BMJ Publishing Group) and an Advisory Editor for Social Science and Medicine.

Mary Schooling’s public health research interests focus on non-communicable diseases, specifically 1) applying evolutionary biology, i.e., growth and reproduction trading-off against longevity, to understand population health, to optimize early life interventions, and to identify new interventions 2) using the unique attributes of Southern China to explicate the role of key modifiable exposures, such as alcohol use, diet, obesity, physical activity, breastfeeding and traditional Chinese medicines, in non-communicable diseases and 3) exploiting discrepancies between East and West to identify novel drivers of population health. Key resources for this endeavour are cohort studies including "Children of 1997", the Elderly Health Service Cohort and the Guangzhou Biobank Cohort Study exploited using innovative methods, such as Mendelian randomization.

This research program crossing traditional boundaries of individual disciplines or fields of enquiry has yielded several translatable mechanistic insights.

1. A comprehensive explanation for the changing patterns of disease with the epidemiological transition including the emergence of higher rates of ischemic cardiovascular disease in men than women and the differing patterns of disease by migration status, specifically the higher risk of diabetes, hemorrhagic stroke and infection related cancers but lower risk of hormone related cancers and ischemic cardiovascular disease often seen in migrants from less to more economically developed settings. 
2. Recognition by the United States Food and Drug Administration (2014/5) and Health Canada (2014) that androgens are a new cardiovascular disease risk factor, with impact on sales and practice
3. Identification of existing classes of drugs, such as neurokinin 3 receptor antagonists and the traditional Chinese medicine puerarin, likely acting on the reproductive axis, which could be used more generally to combat cardiovascular disease.