Dr. phil. Maria Wolters is the acting Research Group leader for the group SOC (digital participation) at OFFIS and Reader (associate professor / W2 professor) in Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Her background is in computational linguistics and speech science (PhD, 2000, University of Bonn), she works on human-computer interaction, assistive technology, and eHealth, and she maintains a long-term interest in statistics and mixed methods research. She has published over 90 peer reviewed papers in Human-Computer Interaction, eHealth, and Computational Linguistics.

Maria is passionate about digital inclusion. Around 10% of the population will be excluded from online-only services due to lack of access to technology, a badly designed user experience, lack of interest, or lack of trust. This results in systemic gaps and biases in data-driven systems to support health and social care. Maria is looking at ways to mitigate this by designing solutions that span digital and physical, online and in person.