She documented the powerful role that education, income and self-perceived social status play in a person’s health and longevity.Nancy E. Adler, a health psychologist whose work helped transform the public understanding of the relationship between socioeconomic status and physical health, died on Jan. 4 at her home in San Francisco. She was 77.The cause was pancreatic cancer, her husband, Arnold Milstein, said.Dr. Adler was instrumental in documenting the powerful role that education, income and self-perceived status in society play in predicting health and longevity.Today, the connection is well known — a truism among public health experts is that life expectancy is determined more by your ZIP code than your genetic code. But it was an obscure notion as recently as 30 years ago.“It’s thanks to the decades of Nancy’s work and leadership that we now recognize socioeconomic status as one of the biggest and most consistent predictors of morbidity and mortality that we know of,” said Elissa Epel, a health psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and a mentee of Dr. Adler’s.Beginning in 1997, Dr. Adler led the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health, a group of health economists, epidemiologists, physicians, public health experts, psychologists and sociologists that studied the relationship between socioeconomic status and health. The group has been credited with bringing into the mainstream the concept of social determinants of health, along with their implications for health and social policy.“They looked at the question, ‘How does inequity or poverty or stress get under your skin?’” said Claire Brindis, a public health and policy researcher at U.C.S.F. “How does it affect your life? How many years are you going to live?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?