Education
She moved to the United States of America in 1994, where she obtained a master"s degree (1994) and a Doctor of Philosophy (1997) in Mathematics from the University of Chicago, under the supervision of Melvin Rothenberg, with a thesis on Three dimensional aspects of Seiberg-Witten Gauge Theory.
Career
Marcolli obtained her Laurea in Physics in 1993 summa cum laude from the University of Milan under the supervision of Renzo Piccinini, with a thesis on Classes of self equivalences of fibre bundles. Between 1997 and 2000 she worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) as a C.L.E. Moore instructor in the Department of Mathematics. She also held an honorary professorship at the University of Bonn.
Since 2008 she is full professor of Mathematics in the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
She held visiting positions at the Tata Institute of Fundamental in Mumbai, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Stockholm, the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, and the Mathematical Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California. Marcolli"s research work has covered different areas of mathematics and theoretical physics: gauge theory and low-dimensional topology, algebraic-geometric structures in quantum field theory, noncommutative geometry with applications to number theory and to physics models, especially related to particle physics, quantum gravity and cosmology, and to the quantum Hall effect.
She has collaborated with several other mathematicians and physicists, among them Yuri I. Manin and Alain Connes. Ten graduate students obtained their Doctor of Philosophy under her supervision between 2006 and 2010.