Marta is the Director at Young Lives. She joined the Young Lives team in 2015 and since then she has been leading the quantitative research team. Marta is a development economist. She became the director in 2024. 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 Masters in Economics from the University of Leuven (Belgium). She is a Research Fellow at IZA and a Researcher Fellow with the Oxford Martin Programme on African Governance since 2018.

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, South-Saharan Africa and Asia.