Maria is a systemic functional sociolinguist who researches and teaches in lexical, grammatical and semantic variation across contexts. She is particularly interested in appliable linguistics, where she can use her expertise to solve social issues. Maria is an expert in Systemic Functional Linguistics and has applied this in forensic and health contexts. More recently she has applied SFL to her current research areas of academic and professional communication. Primarily a qualitative researcher, Maria uses corpus assisted techniques to enhance her work with a quantitative dimension. Maria is the project leader of the Lit@MQ corpus project. The Lit@MQ corpus is a cross disciplinary collaboration between researchers in the dept of linguistics and the dept of educational studies and, when complete, will be a longitudinal collection of both spoken and written student assignments representing all stages of undergraduate study. It will enable us to measure the literacy levels and literacy development of Macquarie undergraduate students.