Rosemarie Schwenker completed both her Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Psychology and her Master’s degree in Sociology at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena from 2007 to 2013. She then worked as a Child Protection Coordinator at the University Children’s Hospitals in Jena and Leipzig, where she supported children who had experienced maltreatment, abuse and neglect by coordinating and monitoring the necessary procedures, including medical treatment, psychosocial counselling, police interviews and work with the Child Welfare Department. From 2017 to 2019, with the support of the World Childhood Foundation, she helped set up Germany’s first Childhood House at the University Children’s Hospital in Leipzig, an outpatient and multidisciplinary and interagency approach to support children and young people who have experienced physical and/or sexualised violence. 
She also worked in operational crisis management in refugee shelters in North Frisia and Leipzig, where she developed and implemented migration-sensitive child protection approaches. 
After working in multidisciplinary child protection groups and gaining a deep insight into medical child protection practices, she became interested in working on the topic from a research perspective. She completed a doctorate in Medical Sociology, focusing on how social problems are thought about, researched and practically addressed from a medical perspective. 
In 2023, she joined the Department of Child Health Services Research as a visiting researcher. Since 2024, she has been a postdoctoral researcher and co-leader of the ‘EvaChild’ project, head of the ‘Child Protection in Medicine’ course for medical and dental students and supervisor of master’s and doctoral theses. 
She is also co-spokesperson of the Early Career Working Group of the German Society for Social Medicine and Prevention (DGSMP), co-initiator of the Working Group's Peer Support Meeting and involved in the DGSMP’s mentoring format.