Martínez de la Vega was born in Mexico City, on January 5, 1971. Her family worked as lawyers, and discouraged her from going into science, but nevertheless she ended up studying mathematics at UNAM, and wrote an undergraduate thesis in topology that she published as a journal paper in Topology and its Applications.[2] Continuing to graduate study in topology at UNAM, she completed her PhD in 2002 with the dissertation Estudio sobre dendroides y compactaciones supervised by Polish topologist Janusz J. Charatonik, becoming his only female doctoral student.[2][3]
After postgraduate research at UAM Iztapalapa and California State University, Sacramento, she joined the Institute of Mathematics as a researcher in 2005.[4]
