Maria Paula Barón Aristizabal is a professor at Universidad de Los Andes where she studied design. Maria also received a master's degree in Textiles at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. In 2014, she became a full-time professor at Universidad de Los Andes and participated in the creation of the Master's Degree in Design program, where she served as the academic coordinator for 4 years. As a teacher, she mainly teaches design language and design thinking, her research orbits around empathy, storytelling, biodesign, and design thinking as a transformative axis of education. In her projects she has collaborated with different departments such as psychology, history, engineering. She has worked in the Colombian Pacific and the Caribbean coast.