Rosa María Marión obtained her PhD degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology in 1999 at the Spanish National Center of Biotechnology in Madrid, under the supervision of Dr. Juan Ortin. Her research focused on the regulation of viral and cellular gene expression in influenza virus-infected cells. After her thesis, she pursued her PhD project with a two-years post-doc in Juan Ortin´s lab.
 
In 2001 she joined the laboratory of Dr. Erin K. O´Shea at the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF) as a postdoctoral fellow. During this period, she developed a high-throughput screening to identify new yeast transcription factors involved in the cellular responses to stress and characterized their contribution to the gene expression reprogamming.