Coclite studied chemistry at the University of Bari, her home city. After obtaining her doctorate in 2010, she worked as a post-doc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston before coming to TU Graz in 2013. Anna Maria Coclite received a Marie Curie Fellowship for theThree-S project in 2014 and in the same year she was awarded a research grant for the Pro-CVD project by the Austrian Science Fund.