Roldán Cuenya studied at the University of Oviedo in Spain and received her doctorate degree from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany under the supervision of 
Werner Keune. As a postdoc she worked at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the group of Eric McFarland and subsequently became professor at the University of Central Florida in Orlando (USA). In 2013, she accepted a Chair Faculty position in Solid State Physics at the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. She holds two roles at the Fritz Haber Institute - since 2017 as Director of the Department of Interface Science, and since April 2023 as interim Director of the Department of Inorganic Chemistry.
Her main research interests are the synthesis of nanostructured materials with tunable surface properties and the experimental investigation of structure-reactivity relationships in thermal and electro-catalysis using in situ and operando methods. Applications of her work are in the areas of environmental remediation and energy conversion.