Dr. Rodriquez-Trias was raised by a Puerto Rican immigrant family in New York and began her medical career in Puerto Rico, establishing the island's first care center for newborn babies. She returned to New York to provide billingual care at the notoriously underfunded Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx in the 1970s, and became a founding member of the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse in 1979. In the 1980s, Rodriguez-Trias served as the first medical director of the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute.

In 1993, Dr. Rodriquez-Trias becomes the first Latina head of the American Public Health Association, sadly passing away from lung cancer later that year. She is remembered as a "brilliant, joyful, progressive woman and mentor to so many that always centered the needs of BIPOC communities" (Elsa Rios).