Maria Vilaplana earned her PhD from the University of Alicante. She holds a Second-Cycle Undergraduate Degree in Advertising and Public Relations and a Master’s Degree in Business Management. She has recently been selected by Laspau, an entity affiliated with Harvard University, to benefit from a Santander Scholarship and attend an Innovation in Teaching Programme to improve her teaching skills.

At present, she is an assistant lecturer in the Department of Communication and Social Psychology of the University of Alicante, where she teaches the course Audiovisual Narratives Applied to Advertising in the third year of the Undergraduate Degree in Advertising and Public Relations. She is an active member of the Research Group in Audiovisual Communication (ICOMAV).

For nearly fifteen years she has worked in a consultancy specialising in the management of subsidies and tax incentives, especially in the area of research, development and innovation (R&D&I), combining it for the last six years with an associate lecturer position at the University of Alicante. Likewise, she has given more than fifty lectures on public aid in the Valencia Region and the rest of Spain and she is Secretary of the Association "El Círculo de Directivos de Alicante" which brings together businessmen and managers in the province.

She currently has a six-year research activity period recognised by the Valencia Region Agency for Prospective Planning and Assessment (26/10/2021). Her research is concerned with three key areas: first, the communication and transparency of public aid in Spain, which was the subject matter of her thesis; second, audiovisual narratives applied to advertising, focusing on aspects such as the use of humour in advertisements; and, finally, teaching innovation. As a result of her interest in teaching, she has carried out different studies on topics like the use of innovative methodologies (e.g. flipped classroom), motivational language or short videos in university teaching.