María E. Maza Fernández

Researcher

mazame@unican.es

+34 942 20 16 16 Ext. 56238

Biography

María Maza is an Associate Professor at the University of Cantabria (UC) and a senior researcher at the Institute of Environmental Hydraulics of Cantabria (IHCantabria) where she leads the team focused on the analysis of nature-based solutions for coastal defense and climate change adaptation, within the Risk, Resilience and Adaptation group. María is a Civil Engineer (2010), she obtained her master’s degree in Port and Coastal Engineering in 2012 and her doctorate in 2015 from the University of Cantabria, for which she received the Extraordinary Doctorate Award from the UC. Later, she did a post-doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department (CEE). Her research focuses on unraveling the fundamentals and modeling the flow-ecosystem interaction, with the aim of obtaining new tools from basic science and thus promoting the use of so-called Nature-Based Solutions, as coastal protection measures. Based on field and laboratory observations, and on numerical modeling, her work combines complex hydrodynamics with the biophysics of coastal ecosystems, developing new formulations and tools that allow quantifying the coastal protection service provided by these new solutions. Currently, based on all the basic knowledge and the new tools generated, she is working on the definition of guidelines and recommendations that will allow Nature-Based Solutions to be considered as coastal adaptation measures to the effects of climate change. María has worked on more than 40 competitive projects including international consortiums, has presented her work at more than 50 international conferences, including 10 as invited speaker, and has participated in seminars at different institutions including Cornell University, United Stated Geological Survey (USGS) and the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC).

PUBLICATIONS