Maria Rosales-Rueda is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Irvine. She has worked at Fedesarrollo, a Colombian think tank, at the World Bank, and at the Inter-American Development Bank. Her dissertation investigates the interactions between family investments, early-life shocks and human capital formation among children. In other work with Professor Heckman and Rodrigo Pinto, she studies the channels (e.g. maternal investments and children's skills) underlying a nurse home visiting program in the U.S. that combine prenatal care, parenting education and family planning components targeted to disadvantaged mothers.

Rosales-Rueda received a B.A. and M.A. in Economics from the Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia in 2002 and 2005 respectively, and a Master's Of Public Policy with honors and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2009 and 2014 respectively.