Maria currently focuses her work on Artificial Intelligence (AI) safety and its capacity to make our lives better. 

Maria is the founder of Plan A, a public benefit initiative mobilizing business and civil society leaders to shape a safe and thriving AI future. With partners like RAND and the Aspen Institute, Plan A runs simulations, workshops, and sector-focused Future Building and Future Proofing Labs that make the risks and opportunities of advanced AI tangible. Through this work, Plan A has produced tools including an AI Ready Guide and an Advanced AI Action Stack.  To date, Plan A has engaged more than 125 business and civil society leaders.

Maria is Chair of the Board for LawZero (along with founder  Yoshua Bengio, Turing Award  winner and AI creator). Maria is also  Chair Emeritus of The Girl Effect (Nike). A list of her previous boards is below. 

Maria’s experience in operations, economic growth  and innovation stems from her leadership across industries. She is widely known for her work with Nike, joining in 1998 as the founding Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility. Maria helped spearhead the effort to overhaul Nike’s business practices and the company’s global footprint in arenas like sustainability, governance and labor practices, leading to industry-changing policies. Nike went on to become recognized as a leader in corporate responsibility and sustainability.

In 2005, Maria founded the Nike Foundation, focusing on unleashing the potential of adolescent girls living in  poverty. Along with her team, Maria hypothesized that investing in adolescent girls would pay enormous dividends — not just for girls, but for their families, communities, and nations. Alongside economists from the World Bank, the Nike Foundation demonstrated how empowering girls could be the greatest point of leverage in breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty. This idea, which would come to be known as the “Girl Effect,” became the spark for a movement. In 2015, having invested $130 million through 150 partners across 90 countries, Nike transitioned the Girl Effect into an independent organization, and Maria became the Chair Emeritus of the Girl Effect Board of Directors.

She began her career as a journalist and then moved to the White House as Special Assistant to the President for Media Affairs. She managed communications and public relations for MCI Communications, served as Director of Public Affairs for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and led Corporate Affairs for Microsoft’s European operations in Paris, France.

A native of Everett, Washington, Maria holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from McGill University, a Master of Science degree from Georgetown University, as well as an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Babson College. She is a graduate of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Executive Program and a Visiting Fellow of Practice at the Blavatnik School of Government at The University of Oxford. 

She lives in Seattle, Paris and London.