Maria Papadopouli (Ph.D., Columbia University, 2002) is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Crete, a Research Associate at the Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, a Lead Researcher at the Archimedes Research Unit, Athena Research Center, and a Fulbright Scholar. She has been an MSCA Fellow at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School (2022-2025), a Fulbright Scholar at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), MIT (2017), and a visiting Professor at the School of Electrical Engineering, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. From July 2002 until June 2006, she was a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), on leave from July 2004 until June 2006. She is interested in understanding the underlying dynamics of various complex real-world networks, from the Internet to the brain. Her research has been supported by several awards (e.g., IBM Faculty Awards, Google Faculty Award) and national, EU, and international grants. Her long-term objective is to establish a multi-disciplinary research hub at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence (neuro-AI) in Greece. She is a co-founder of the Greeks in AI grassroots initiative that aims to connect Greek AI researchers globally.

In the context of her Fulbright 2026-2027 scholarship, she will study the neuronal ensemble organization and plasticity in the context of experience-dependent sequential learning in the visual cortex and examine implications for continual learning in artificial neural networks.