Maria is a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at Vector Institute, where she works with Rahul Krishnan and Michael Brudno. She earned her PhD in Bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in Dan Fletcher’s laboratory. Maria’s doctoral research focused on developing low-cost, portable microscopy platforms that replace the need for laboratory infrastructure for the diagnosis of infectious diseases. She led an interdisciplinary collaboration of industrial and academic partners to develop, test, and deploy the NTDscope, a portable microscope for diagnosing neglected tropical diseases (NTDs)—a group of conditions that collectively affect more than one billion people globally. She also developed machine learning models to identify the NTDs schistosomiasis and Loa loa using images and videos collected on the NTDscope in remote field settings. Maria also worked on the development of a mobile phone-based fluorescence microscope capable of detecting SARS-CoV-2 in patient samples. This work provided the first demonstration of accurate, rapid, and sensitive detection of viral RNA using the enzyme CRISPR-Cas13a without requiring nucleic acid pre-amplification.