Maria is a Post-doc at the University of Göttingen (Germany), where she unpacks the complexities of seed systems and the impacts of climate change on the latter. Maria recently received her Doctorate from the University of Bonn for looking at plant breeding systems from a social-ecological systems perspective. She started out with looking at resistance breeding in German winter wheat.  She went to  Cornell University (U.S.) as a Post-doc and expanded her knowledge to different crops, like corn, and geographies, like the U.S.. For her interdisciplinary research, Maria uses qualitative and quantitative methods from economics and social sciences to work on sustainability and resilience problems of crop genetic resources, climate change adaptation in agriculture and their application for policy and governance.