Maria is an agricultural economist at the University of Göttingen (Germany), where she unpacks the complexities of governance of innovation in agricultural input industries with a focus on the economics of crop genetic resource systems. She is interested in finding solutions to the impacts of climate change on seed systems. Maria received her Doctorate from 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 canola, 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, technology adoption, climate change adaptation in agriculture and their application for policy and governance.