Maria's research focus is in the areas of thread-level speculation, automatic performance tuning, parallel programming, and reliability. She has published in some of the most selective conferences, such as PLDI, HPCA, ISCA, PPoPP, PACT, and CGO. Maria was program co-chair of the workshop on languages and compilers for parallel computing and the workshop on programming models for ubiquitous parallelism. She received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain, in 2002 and is the recipient of the 2002 Best PhD Thesis Award from Universidad de Zaragoza. She is a member of IEEE and ACM. Additional information can be found in her website.