Maria has a doctoral degree in Information Systems from Trinity College Dublin and the title of her thesis was: A Case Study of Action Design Research for Privacy Risk Management Engineering. She completed her studies in 2014. She has over twenty years of research and consultancy experience in the fields of informational privacy and security. Currently, Maria is the Chief Privacy Officer (CPO) for the European COST Action entitled “Fintech and Artificial Intelligence in Finance”. This action consists of a network of universities (50+) across Europe and beyond with 300+ active researchers involved in research collaboration. She also holds the position of Senior Data Protection Consultant and Researcher as an Irish SME entitled PrivacyEngine. She is a Fulbright scholar and, in 2019, studied with Professor David Maimon at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia where she continues to be a partnered faculty member in the Evidence-Based Cybersecurity Research Group at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies there. She is an adjunct research fellow in the Performance Engineering Lab (PEL) in the School of Computer Science in University College Dublin. In recent years, Maria’s interests have moved towards the intersection of data protection and Artificial Intelligence. As a result, she accepted the position of vice-chair of the CEDPO (Confederation of European Data Protection Organisations) Working Group in Artificial Intelligence (CEDPO AI WG), where she has jointly published a series of opinion papers on the potential impact of the EU’s proposed Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) on the role of the data protection officer. In May 2023, she presented a policy paper to the COST Association in Brussels entitled “Ethical Artificial Intelligence, Fintech and Data Protection: A Path Forward for Training in Europe”. She is also an active member of the executive committee for CEDPO and for the Association for Data Protection Officers (ADPO) in Ireland.