Maria is interested in how we acquire linguistic knowledge and how our experience with language supports learning in other areas and across the lifespan. One focus of her research is reading — how we learn to read in different writing systems and how reading can be taught most effectively. Another central focus is how we learn and forget words, and how both the properties of the words (e.g., whether they come from a first or later-acquired language, their structural complexity, or whether they are abstract or concrete) and the way we learn them (e.g., through recreational reading or in instructional settings) affect long-term retention and how our understanding of word meanings changes over time. She addresses these questions using methods from cognitive science and neuroscience. Her work to date has focused primarily on children and young adults, and going forward she aims to extend it to middle adulthood and neurodiverse populations.

 

Maria has a strong interest in applied statistics and cares deeply about open science and healthy research culture. She has actively worked to improve research methods and practices in cognitive neuroscience, and this work was recognised with the Credibility Prize by the British Neuroscience Association in 2023. Maria is also committed to making research accessible and involving diverse voices into research to drive positive change, so she strives to engage teachers, educators, and policymakers at all stages of her research. You can read more about Maria's involvement with education stakeholders here. 

 

Prior to joining Aston, Maria was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Rastle lab at Royal Holloway, University of London. She earned a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience through the IDEALAB PhD programme at the University of Potsdam (Germany) and Macquarie University (Australia).