Maria grew up in Athens, Greece, where she earned her B.Sc. in Chemistry from the University of Athens in 2016. After working as a chemical analyst in the pharmaceutical industry, she pursued a Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry at the same university in the group of Prof. Christiana A. Mitsopoulou. Her work focused on the development of transition metal catalysts for hydrogen evolution, combining computational chemistry with electrochemical experiments. She received her Ph.D. in 2022 and subsequently joined the group of Dr. Dimitrios A. Pantazis at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung, Department of Molecular Theory and Spectroscopy. There, she investigated biological water oxidation and solar energy conversion in photosynthetic pigment-protein complexes using advanced quantum-chemical methods. In 2025, Maria joined TU Darmstadt as a Liebig fellow group leader, and in 2026 she accepted a CNRS researcher position at the Institute of Molecular Sciences of Marseille.

Her work has been recognized by an Onassis Foundation Scholarship (2018), Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation Scholarship (2019), Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Scholarship for Postdocs (2023), Ernst Haage Prize for Postdocs (2023), and a Liebig fellowship (2025).