Maria graduated from Duke University in 2010 with a Bachelor of Arts in Literature. She spent her time at Duke immersing herself in as wide an array of coursework as possible, taking everything from literary interpretation and cinema to computer science and geology. She immediately started putting that knowledge to use; while still in college she published several works of fiction in online magazines, and then started writing book reviews for an online site as well.

She spent the next few years in education, working with English as a Second Language students of all ages while abroad, and kindergarteners after returning to the United States. A large part of her role as a teacher and program supervisor involved research and curriculum writing; in fact, her favorite parts of the job often involved figuring out how to distill complicated concepts into easily-understandable, scaffolded lessons, all of which would help her when she later began to freelance in the nutrition and health fields.

She then segued into the world of education technology, where she's been ever since. She began as a recruiter/sourcing specialist for an award-winning tutoring company, interviewing and working with subject matter experts in the fields of both STEM and the humanities. More recently, she's worked as a career coach and no-code developer at a remote school for software developers, where she spends her days writing documentation, creating curricula to help software engineers further develop their professional skills, and building out an extensive network of no-code automations.

Over the past year and a half, she's written a number of freelance articles for a website in the health industry. Each of those articles has been meticulously researched, optimized for SEO, and written carefully to ensure that even those with no background in nutrition will be able to easily follow along. It's hard, detail-oriented work, but hey--that's why she loves it.