I am a Senior Research Scientist and Lead of a subroup within NVIDIA Toronto AI Lab, where I both pursue research and drive practical, user-driven releases. In the past, my pursuits alternated between industry and academia. I defended my PhD in 2020 at the University of Toronto, where I was supervised by the best duo of advisers, Karan Singh and Sanja Fidler, and received Canada's Alain Fournier Award for outstanding doctoral dissertation in Computer Graphics. Prior to this, I was a Research Engineer at Adobe Research (Cambridge, MA). Before Adobe, I got my Master’s from MIT at the Computational Fabrication Group. To join MIT, I had to take a leap of faith and leave my role of Senior Software Engineer / Tech Lead at Google (NYC and Zurich), where I worked on crowdsourcing for maps and on speech recognition for over 5 years. My Bachelor's is from Boston University, where I have Margrit Betke to thank for introducing me to research.

I love spending time with my family and painting. I also enjoy weight lifting, running, travel, long hikes, growing and foraging for edible things, cooking, downhill skiing, cats and random crafts.

To avoid any confusion, Maria is my formal name.