Borgerhoff Mulder was born in April 1953[1] in Den Haag, Holland[2] but was raised in Beirut and Great Britain.
[3] Borgerhoff Mulder and her husband Tim Caro began conducting research in Mpimbwe, Tanzania, in 1995 which evolved to her gathering detailed economic, health and social information on the families in Kibaoni.
In 2015, Borgerhoff Mulder's research team compared polygynous and monogamous households in 56 villages in northern Tanzania to see how their access to food and healthier children differed.
[5] Borgerhoff Mulder retired from UC Davis in 2019 and joined the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
[7] Later that month, she was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences for her projects relating to life history, inequality, natural resource management and patterned cultural variation.