Mara brings a robust research background and nearly a decade of industry experience, having served as a Senior Economist in a public teaching hospital, Business Manager, and Main Inspector at the National Agency for Fiscal Administration. She earned her PhD from the University of Galway, Ireland.
Currently, Mara is a Lecturer in Operations and Supply Chain Management at ATU Ireland, where she also coordinates the MSc in Supply Chain Analytics programme. She is an active member of the Operations and Supply Chain Research (OSCAR) group at ATU.
Her research focuses on governance structures and operations management within mandated hospital networks, with a particular emphasis on Social Capital theory and its relevance to networks and supply chains. Her work received the Best Paper Award for Young Scholars at the 2018 European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM) conference.
Mara has played a key role in programme development at ATU and securing research funding, including an Irish Research Council (IRC) postgraduate scholarship and TU RISE funding. She supervises both PhD and Master’s level research projects and contributes to multiple EU-funded initiatives at ATU. These projects address topics such as the integration of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into engineering education and the hospitality sector, as well as promoting Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) practices among SMEs.