She received her PhD from Princeton in 2003 and was named one of Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10” in 2004. Maria was awarded the 2009 Fulkerson Prize, as part of a team of researchers, for their proof of the Strong Perfect Graph Theorem, a forty year old conjecture, that had been a well known open problem in both graph theory and combinatorial optimization. In 2012 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.