Maria earned her PhD from the Language Technologies Institute (School of Computer Science) at Carnegie Mellon University. Her dissertation work focused on computational modelling of non-standard language uses and the evolution of language norms. Following that, Maria held a postdoctoral appointment at MIT, where she used methods from cognitive neuroscience and NeuroAI to study how conceptual meaning is represented in the brain and in large language models. In her current position as a CIFAR AI Safety Postdoctoral Fellow, Maria collaborates with Prof. Gillian Hadfield on developing interdisciplinary approaches to AI alignment, focusing on how multi-agent interaction can help normative reasoning emerge in large language models.