Maria is a PhD student in Cognitive Science, based at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and at the University of Potsdam in Germany. She studies how adults learn, retain, consolidate and/or forget words in their first and later-acquired languages. For instance, she is interested in how different aspects of the word learning process are affected by the context in which novel words are trained. Her research interests also concern the interplay between different memory systems at different stages of word acquisition, and how this is influenced by familiarity/novelty of new information compared to already existing knowledge. Maria also has a keen interest in the role of sleep and age-related processes in word learning. She uses behavioral and electrophysiological methods to examine these issues, and she is also very enthusiastic about statistics and computational modelling.