Maria has a DPhil from the University of Oxford on learning pragmatic knowledge from text and her research interests include text mining, natural language processing (NLP), related social and biomedical applications, analysis of multi-modal and heterogeneous data (text from various sources such as social media, sensor data, images) and biological text mining. Her work has contributed to advances in knowledge discovery from corpora, automation of scientific experimentation and automatic extraction of information from the scientific literature. She has published widely both in NLP and interdisciplinary venues.