María José Castro is an Associate Professor of the Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain, where she has taught since 1993. She received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from this same University, in 1998. Her research interests include machine learning, speech and handwritten text recognition and language technologies. Currently, she is part of the Dean's leadership team of the School of Computer Science.