Roth is Professor of Sociology and the Graduate Group in Demography at the University of Pennsylvania where she has been appointed since 2019. She chaired the Sociology Graduate Program from 2021-2025. Prior to 2019, she was a tenured sociologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C.  Roth holds a PhD in Sociology and Public Policy from Harvard University, an MPhil in Sociology from Oxford University and a BA in Sociology from Yale University. Her research focuses primarily on how social processes challenge racial and ethnic boundaries and transform classification systems, as well as how these processes change conceptions of the nature of race. Her book, Race Migrations: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race (Stanford University Press 2012) examines how immigration changes cultural concepts of race, not only for the migrants themselves, but also for their host society, and for the societies they left behind. Her current work focuses on how genetic ancestry testing influences racial and ethnic identities, conceptions of race, racial attitudes, and racial interactions.

She has received several awards for her research, including the 2007 American Sociological Association Outstanding Dissertation Award, the 2011 Oliver Cromwell Cox Article Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities, the 2016 Canadian Sociological Association Early Career Scholar Award, and a 2017 Killam Faculty Research Fellowship. She has also served as Chair of the ASA Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities.