Maria joined IBM CAS in January 2015 as a M.Sc. candidate and studied the effects of NUMA awareness in the Java VM and how this can be used to efficiently share the CPU/memory in Java applications. Upon completion of her degree in 2017, she remained with the research group as a Ph.D. candidate. She started investigating Node.js in a cloud environment and methods to enhance execution performance and developer support.

She has gone above and beyond her role and is a true leader in the CAS-Atlantic research group. Maria takes the initiative to conduct her research withminimal supervision and consistently engages with other students across multiple research projects, offering suggestions and assistance in their research work. In addition to her contribution to IBM, while working on testing ideas around improving Cloud-based software, she helped devise a solution for a local start-up company struggling with scalability issues.

Maria's work made significant contributions to IBM's technological development, which has led to many prototypes, two patents, one journal publication, eleven papers and ten posters.