Marta earned her doctorate in Geography, specializing in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), spatial statistics, and health geography.

 

As a health geographer, she is now a researcher at the Qualcomm Institute at UCSD. Marta received NSF funding for her doctoral dissertation, which she planned and implemented in Accra, Ghana, focusing on using GPS data collection, photography, and survey data regarding the health perceptions of children.

 

She completed her postdoctoral training at the UCSD Department of Family Medicine and Public Health. She has experience working with and leading multidisciplinary teams as PI of an NSF project and four pilot grants funded under the Stein Institute for Research on Aging at UCSD, the UCSD Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (CCBB), and San Diego Center for Systems Biology (SDCSB), the UCSF Preterm Birth Initiative, and the Transdisciplinary Research in Energetics (TREC) in Cancer initiative, through which she has overseen the developed the HIPAA compliant geodatabase system used for secure storage and processing of large GIS and GPS datasets.

 

Marta is currently the PI of an NSF-funded grant examining the relationship between the built food environment, obesity, and dietary behaviors using high-resolution location, behavior, and photographic sensors.

 

Marta is an emerging leader in methodologies and computational infrastructure for integrating GPS technologies with body-worn health sensors and measuring environmental exposure from these sensors with multiple publications in this realm.

​