Marcela Cárdenas completed her doctorate in Physical Sciences at the University of Concepción and the CECs. He has carried out postdoctoral stays at the University of Paris 7 (APC Laboratory), at the University of Santiago and finally at the Science and Technology Research Ring of ANID, HolographyCL, UNAB and PUC. She is currently an assistant professor at USS and a member of the university's doctoral faculty in Physics.

His areas of interest are focused on the Hamiltonian formalism of classical mechanics, General Relativity and the study of Noether symmetries. In this sense, his teaching areas include teaching the fundamentals of mechanics at the classical and quantum levels, as well as the principles of symmetry that characterize various field theories.

He studies the asymptotic structure of different theories of gravity as well as the physics of black holes, specializing in lower dimensions, in the context of the holographic principle. More recently, his work is motivated by finding new symmetries of gravity related to integrable systems and the understanding of non-linear phenomena with a large number of symmetries.