Marina Pollán has a degree in Medicine from the University of Salamanca and is a specialist in Preventive Medicine and Public Health. She also studied at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (Baltimore, USA), also at the Karolinska Institute (Stockholm, Sweden), and obtained the extraordinary doctorate prize with her thesis on breast cancer at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). In 2023 she was named Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Granada.

Pollán is the first director of the ISCIII to have spent her entire career in the organisation, as she joined ISCIII in 1990. She has been a Research Professor at the National Epidemiology Centre (CNE-ISCIII) since 2016 and has held the position of scientific director of the Consortium for Biomedical Research in Epidemiology and Public Health (CIBERESP) since 2017. She was director of the National Epidemiology Centre between February 2019 and October 2022, coordinating the work of the centre during the COVID-19 pandemic. She was also the scientific coordinator of the National Seroprevalence Study of SARS-CoV-2 infection (ENE-COVID), internationally recognised as a reference study.

Her priority line of research is the study of cancer risk factors, mainly those associated with lifestyle and specifically those related to breast cancer, but also other common malignant tumours. As a researcher, she has more than 300 scientific articles (index H=52) and has extensive teaching experience in subjects related to cancer epidemiology and epidemiological methodology.

She has been part of the coordination of project evaluation in both the National Agency for Evaluation and Prospective (ANEP) and the ISCIII´s Health Research Fund (FIS), and has participated in numerous expert groups and national and international scientific committees. Since 2021, he has coordinated the Predictive Medicine área of the IMPaCT project (Infrastructure for Precision Medicine associated with Science and Technology), which aim is to create with the Health Services of all the Autonomous Communities a large national cohort based in Primary Care that will serve as a research infrastructure in Spain.