Senior Advisor for Science Communications and Advocacy for the African Academy of Sciences in Nairobi, Kenya. She was prior Chief Executive Officer of the nonprofit scientific publisher and advocacy organization the Public Library of Science (PLOS) . PLOS publishes leading open access scientific journals, including PLOS Biology, PLOS Medicine and PLOS ONE. She was formerly President of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization Society for Science & the Public, and publisher of the award-winning Science News family of publications.

Marincola was for fourteen years Executive Director of the American Society for Cell Biology, a scientific society which is a leader in Congressional advocacy for biomedical research funding, promoting access to the scientific literature, and the support of women and underrepresented minorities in science. For its work, Marincola accepted the 2004 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring from the President of the United States. The ASCB honored her service in 2002 by naming her, with the late actor-advocate Christopher Reeve, the first Citizen Member of the Society.

Marincola served on the founding National Advisory Committee to PubMed Central of the National Institutes of Health from 2000-2003, as Director of the Joint Steering Committee for Public Policy (now the Coalition for the Life Sciences) from 1991-2005, on the Board of Directors of PLOS from 2005-2011, and on the Advisory Council of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University from 2002-2012. She is the only nonscientist to be named the Fae Golden Kass Lecturer at Harvard Medical School.

Marincola was Director of Development for Stanford University Hospital and held other administrative posts at Stanford, where she also earned her bachelor’s degree in 1981 and her MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1986. She has served as Principal Investigator or co-PI on several Federal research grants, and is author or co-author of dozens of articles published in journals and magazines, including Harvard Business Review, Cell and Science.