Maria Costa is a PhD student in Informatics at Lusófona University, researching serious games, human-computer interaction, and virtual reality in the context of marine conservation. She holds a Master’s and Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa. At HEI-Lab, she has contributed to multiple funded R&D projects, developing tools for biosignal analysis, virtual reality training, and game evaluation. Her work includes the design of a serious game that significantly improved children's knowledge and perception of sharks. She has presented at international conferences (ICGI 2024, Videogame Sciences and Arts), co-authored several scientific publications, and was awarded a scholarship to the International Summer School in Games and AI (2024). Her technical skills include Python, C#, Java, C++, Scala, HTML, and CSS.