Marina Escolano-Poveda is a Lecturer in Egyptology at the Department of Classics, Ancient History, Archaeology, and Egyptology of the University of Manchester. She holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies (Egyptology) from the Johns Hopkins University, 2017. She started her doctoral studies in the United States as a Fulbright scholar in 2010-12. Before this she had completed a 5-year BA (Spanish 'Licenciatura', equivalent to a British BA+MA) in History at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, being awarded at its completion the First Place National Award of Excellence in Undergraduate Academic Performance, Class of 2009 (Primer Premio Nacional de Fin de Carrera, Promoción de 2009). From 2018 to 2021 she worked as full-time Lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Liverpool.  From 2019 to 2021 she held a Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (host: Prof. Christian Leitz).

Marina Escolano-Poveda's research focuses on the literature, religion, philosophy, and society of Graeco-Roman Egypt. She is particularly interested in the study of the intellectual milieu of the Egyptian temples of the Graeco-Roman period, and the role of the Egyptian priesthood in the creation and transmission of knowledge in the Ancient and Late Antique worlds. Within this research area, she currently works on the analysis of Graeco-Egyptian astronomical/astrological and early alchemical sources, as well as the Greek Hermetica from an Egyptological perspective. She is also involved in the edition of papyri and ostraca from different international collections. She is part of the project "Traditions of Magical Knowledge. The Papyrus Magical Handbooks in Context" of the University of Chicago, which is preparing a new edition of the Graeco-Egyptian magical formularies. She is also part of the Athribis-Projekt of the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen as specialist in astronomy/astrology, in which she is editing newly discovered Demotic astrological texts.

She combines her philological work with fieldwork in Egypt since 2007. She was a member of the Egypt Exploration Society/Durham University archaeological expedition to Saïs (Sa el-Hagar, Egypt) between 2007 and 2010. From 2011 to 2018 she was part of the team of the Johns Hopkins University archaeological expedition to the Mut Temple at Karnak (Luxor, Egypt), where she worked as trench supervisor and archaeological illustrator. She also has extensive archaeological experience in Spain, having worked in sites from prehistoric to medieval times.