Maria is currently an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics, specializing in the teaching of Greek as a second/foreign language, at the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Philology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

She graduated from the Faculty of Greek Philology in 1992 and obtained a Diploma in Applied Linguistics (specialization: Teaching Languages) from the University of Reading in 1996. She completed her Ph.D. at the Department of Linguistics (NKUA) in 1999. In 2001, she joined the Department of Linguistics as a lecturer.

Since 2003, Maria has been teaching Linguistics at the Interdepartmental Postgraduate Programme for the Teaching of Greek as an L2 at the University of Athens. During this time, she has consistently taught various courses related to syllabus design, second language teaching methodology, and second language classroom observation. She has also trained many instructors of Greek as an L2. From 1997 to 2014, she taught Greek as an L2 at the Modern Greek Language Teaching Centre of the University of Athens.

Maria has been actively involved in refugee language education since 2015, providing academic supervision for the design, implementation, and assessment of several language programs for refugees and migrants. These include projects such as the FLEARS project (2016-2018), TaMam (Mothers' Classrooms in Eleonas, 2017-2019), and the "Curing the Limbo" project in collaboration with the Municipality of Athens (2018-2020).

She has participated in numerous National Programs focused on teaching and assessing Greek as a second language and teacher training for capacity building. With her research team, she designed and developed the first longitudinal corpus for learners of Greek as an L2, known as SEPAME2 (2014-2017), which has been presented at various conferences in Greece and abroad. Finally, Maria is responsible for the training of instructors teaching in multilingual and multicultural classrooms as part of the ongoing program which is implemented by NKUA for the third consecutive year and funded by UNICEF (2020-2023).

Maria combines the teaching of Greek as an L2 with classroom research and Teacher Education. Her primary goal is to establish a significant relationship between practice, theory/research, and teacher education, promoting effective language instruction and contributing to the field.