Ann Varley holds a first class honours degree in Geography from the University of Oxford. Her  doctoral thesis on informal housing in Mexico City won the British-Mexican Society Postgraduate Prize. She worked on an Overseas Development Administration-funded research project on rental and shared housing in Mexico before being appointed lecturer in the Department of Geography. She was appointed Professor of Human Geography in 2009 and became the first social scientist to convene the  UCL Gender Studies programme in 2014.

Ann was Christensen Fellow at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and was awarded an individual residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy, both in 2003. She was one of the first recipients of the University of London Research Fellowship and is a member of the ESRC’s Peer Review College. She was one of the first recipients of the University of London Research Fellowship and is a member of the ESRC’s Peer Review College and the advisory panel of the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission in the UK. She has also served as research evaluator for the Russian Federation Ministry of Science and Technology, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada, the Norwegian Research Council and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

In 2010 Ann was awarded the Busk Medal, one of the senior awards of the Royal Geographical Society, for her work in Mexico.

Ann has been visiting lecturer in the Centro Universitario de Arte, Arquitectura y Diseño, Universidad de Guadalajara; Instituto Mora, Mexico City; the Graduate School and Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin; the Copenhagen Business School; the University of Copenhagen; the Department of International Development Studies, University of Roskilde; the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim; and the Department of Architecture and Design, American University of Beirut.

Ann edits the Bulletin of Latin American Research and is on the editorial advisory board of Home Cultures and, in Mexico, Revista Sociológica and Investigaciones Geográficas.