[3] Rosenbluth obtained her Master of Arts from Radcliffe College in 1947[4] before beginning her PhD in physics at Harvard University under the supervision of Nobel Laureate John Hasbrouck Van Vleck.

[6] After completing her thesis Rosenbluth won an Atomic Energy Commission postdoctoral fellowship to Stanford University which she attended before moving to a staff position at Los Alamos National Laboratory where her research focused on atomic bomb development and statistical mechanics.

Along with Marshall Rosenbluth she verified analytic calculations for the Ivy Mike test using the SEAC at the National Bureau of Standards.

[7][8] Once the MANIAC I had been completed at Los Alamos she collaborated with Nicholas Metropolis, Marshall N. Rosenbluth, Augusta H. Teller, and Edward Teller to develop the first Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm, in particular the prototypical Metropolis–Hastings algorithm, in the seminal paper Equation of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines.

In 1956, she moved from Los Alamos to San Diego, California, where Marshall began to work at General Atomic.