Marta is the Director at Young Lives, University of Oxford. She joined Young Lives in 2015 and since then she has been leading the research team. Marta is a development economist. Her main research interests include labour economics, education economics and behavioural economics.

She has a PhD in Economics from the University of Essex (UK) and a MsC in Economics from the University of Leuven (Belgium). She is a Research Fellow at IZA (affiliate since 2012), an Associate Member of the Department of Economics at the University of Oxford, a Research Fellow with the Oxford Martin Programme on African Governance since 2018, and a Fellow at the Wolfson College (University of Oxford).

Before joining Young Lives, Marta worked as an economist at the World Bank (Young Professionals Programme) in the Poverty, Inequality and Gender Unit for the Latin America and Caribbean Region and in the Education Unit for the Africa Region. She has worked in several research projects, survey designs, impact evaluations, and policy dialogue with public and private institutions in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia.