Maria Emilia’s main interests include human rights, transnational migrations, intersections between race, sexuality and citizenship in migrations, unaccompanied children’s rights, sexual and gender-based violence and new forms of non-violent masculinities. 

She is particularly interested in the South American region. She holds a master’s degree in Anthropology in Public Orientation from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. Prior to her graduate studies, she obtained a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations and Political Sciences at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, where she focused on mobilities and identities within the anthropological field.   

Maria has worked as a Gender and Masculinities Specialist at UN Women and COPARE (Coordinadora de Medios Comunitarios Populares y Educativos del Ecuador, in Spanish) with the Project 'Masculinities in Movement', which promoted the transformation of social imaginaries around traditional masculinity towards new co-responsible and non-violent masculinities. Before that, she has worked as Monitoring, Evaluation and Research Technical Assistant at the Norwegian Refugee Council, where she mainly researched the needs, expectations, obstacles and opportunities of migrant and refugee populations in transit in Ecuador. She was part of UN Women as a Qualitative Territorial Analyst for the study-diagnosis of the rights protection system for young migrants in Ecuador in relation to child care. She was also a consultant for CARE, under the charge of Expert in Project Evaluation with a focus on Human Rights, Gender and Mobility, where she systematized and analyzed the results of the multisectoral response for vulnerable populations affected by the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.   She has also held multiple research assistant positions at institutions such as Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ministry of Economic and Social Inclusion of Ecuador, Governing Council of the Special Regime of Galapagos and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.