Maria Sera was born in Havana, Cuba and emigrated to the U.S. at the age of seven where she initially lived with her grandparents in Washington Heights, New York. After her family was re-united in the U.S. they settled in southern Indiana. She earned her B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Indiana University. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa before being hired by the University of Minnesota in 1989, where she bacme a Full Professor since 2003. She has over 40 publications on the development of language and its role in cognition. She approaches developmental questions from dynamic systems and neural network persepctives. Her work has included monolingual and bilingual speakers of English, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Hungarian and American Sign Language, and is among the first to show that language differences can reflect differences in categorization across speakers of different languages. She currently lives with her husband in Minneapolis.