Maria is a Professor at the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University with more than 25 years of experience as an academic. She is currently a member of the ARC College of Experts, the Co-Chair of the Monash-Woodside FutureLab and until July 2022 was the Deputy Dean Research of the Faculty. Prior to that she was overall Deputy Dean of the Faculty (2013-2016) and the Head of the Caulfield School of Information Technology (2009-2011). Her research interests include Combinatorial Optimisation, Program analysis and Transformation, Programming Languages and Bioinformatics. Since 2010 she has been Area Editor of the Journal of Theory and Practice of Logic Programming and, since 2019, member of the Editorial Board of the Constraints journal. She has been Chief Investigator in 11 ARC grants (2 cross-Faculty), and Principal Investigator in an NHMRC program.

Maria’s PhD won the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid’s Best PhD Award. In 1997 she was awarded the first and only prestigious Logan Fellowship in the Faculty of Information Technology, which she held for six years. In 2005 she won, with Peter Stuckey, the International Constraint Modelling Challenge. She was an elected member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Logic Programming (2005-08) and of the Executive Committee of the Association of Constraint Programming (2017-20), of which she was also elected as President (2019-20). In 2021 she was inducted into the Monash Honour Roll.