María Carlo joined the University of Miami faculty in 2002 after serving as assistant professor in education, Harvard Graduate School of Education.  She also served as project director, Adult Literacy for Bilingual Populations Project, at the University of Pennsylvania.  She earned her Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Massachusetts.

Carlo’s research has focused on the development of literacy skills in bilingual children and adults, including studies on adult literacy for bilingual populations, visual word recognition in bilinguals and processing of cross-language ambiguity.  Her professional articles include “Depth and Breadth of Vocabulary in Two Languages: Which Skills Transfer,” in Journal of Educational Psychology and “The Assessment of Levels of Domain Expertise While Reading” in Cognition & Instruction.

Carlo is co-principal investigator on a NICHD/OERI funded study on the transfer of reading skills from Spanish to English among 4th and 5th grade students.  She was also co-principal investigator of a similar study among 2nd and 3rd grade students.

She has served on the editorial advisory board of Reading Research Quarterly and Contemporary Educational Psychology, and is a member of the American Educational Research Association, International Reading Association, National Consortium on Instruction and Cognition and Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.