Maria Mirto received the PhD degree in Innovative Materials and Technologies at the University of Salento, in 2006. In 2009, she joined the Advanced Scientific Computing Division (former Scientific Computing and Operations Division) at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC).

She has been involved in the following projects as project manager: EU GridLab, FIRB LIBI (International Laboratory on Bioinformatics), EU FP7 IS-ENES, EU FP7 IS-ENES2, PON TESSA, Interreg Greece-Italy 2007-2013 OFIDIA (Operational FIre Danger preventIon plAtform). She is currently involved in the Interreg Greece-Italy 2014-2020 OFIDIA2 project as project manager.

Moreover, she collaborates on the development of a distributed monitoring framework able to capture and display data usage statistics as well as aggregated information for the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) infrastructure.
Her research interests include scientific data management topics with a comprehensive knowledge of libraries and data formats for scientific data, tools for browsing and accessing scientific data, and software for geographic metadata and data management, parallel, distributed and Cloud computing.

She is the co-author of more than 60 papers in refereed books, journals and proceedings on bioinformatics, parallel and Cloud computing, and scientific data management.