Marcela Belardo earned her Bachelor's degree in Political Science from the University of Buenos Aires in 2002. She later completed a Master's degree in Epidemiology, Health Management, and Policy, and obtained her Ph.D. in Social Sciences in 2012. From 2015 to 2017, she conducted postdoctoral research at the Institute of Social Medicine, State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), Brazil.
She is currently a permanent Associate Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), the most prominent scientific institution in Argentina. She has been part of the CONICET research system for over a decade—initially serving as a Researcher for six years, before being promoted to Full Researcher in 2019. She conducts her research at the Institute for the Study of Society in Contexts of Inequality (IESCODE-UNPAZ), where she leads the Health and Inequality research group.
In addition, she has over twenty years of teaching experience and currently holds the position of Associate Professor at the University of Buenos Aires.
Her research focuses on the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of health policy agendas, with a particular interest in the historical context and the roles of various stakeholders—including academia, civil society, and political and economic actors. She specializes in the fields of Translational Research and Knowledge Translation, examining how knowledge generated in laboratories, clinical trials, and epidemiological studies is transformed into public health policies. Her work extends beyond the development of specific interventions to explore the complex mechanisms operating at social, political, and institutional levels. She also studies the dynamics of global health agendas and their influence on regional and national health policies.
Her methodological approach is grounded in the critical perspective of Latin American Social Medicine and Collective Health, a theoretical framework that emerged in the 1970s as an alternative to the dominant Western biomedical model. Beyond academia, she provides technical consulting to the Directorate of Research and Technological Cooperation at the Ministry of Health of Buenos Aires Province.