Rosa's dissertation combines approaches from political science and organizational sociology to investigate the determinants of family policy, particularly the relationship between public and occupational family policy. Her comparative country focus is on the USA and Germany. Her first dissertation article investigates the connections between family policy and child poverty in the 50 US states. The resulting publication "Varieties of Liberalism? A comparative analysis of family policy and poverty outcomes across the 50 United States" won the Barnett Prize from the University of Oxford.
Rosa holds a bachelor's degree in political science from Cornell University in the USA and a master's degree in social policy from the University of Oxford. During her PhD she worked as a research fellow at the Institute of Social Policy and as a social policy tutor at the University of Oxford. She was also project manager from 2015 to 2016 and then director of the student think tank OxPolicy. Rosa is a doctoral fellow of the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). In April 2019, she received an award from the British Academy for a text that communicates the value of her research to the general public.
