In 1992 she started working in the parallel computing group of the newly founded CRS4 on the parallelisation of molecular dynamics codes.
In April 1994, she was awarded a Marie-Curie FP6 fellowship at the CNRS Laboratoire des Physique des Milieux Ionise (LPMI), Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseu, France.
In 1998, she obtained her PhD in Plasma Physics at the Ecole Doctorale de Troisime Cycle de l'Ecole Polytechnique with a thesis on the theoretical and computational analysis of the motion of charged particles in electromagnetic fields.
Since May 1999, she has been an expert researcher in the Fuel Cells area of CRS4, working on molecular dynamics simulations of proton-conducting membranes and the development of a finite volume code for electrochemical systems.
In May 2006, she moved to the Bioinformatics group at CRS4, where she worked on protein structure and dynamics. In the same year, she obtained a master's degree in Bionformatics with a thesis on large-scale protein-protein docking.
Since the beginning of 2010, she has been a member of the AGCT group at CRS4, where she worked on data analysis for case-control studies on genetic diseases.
She currently works as a Senior Researcher in the Simulation&Modelling group at CRS4.
Maria is interested in studying the structure and dynamics of proteins and new materials for real cases and through the development of new methodologies and force fields.