Maria Chekhova obtained her PhD at the Lomonosov Moscow State University (Russia) in 1989 for the spectroscopy of polaritons in near-forward Raman scattering. In the 1990-s - early 2000-s she worked at the same university in the field of quantum optics and in 2004 defended a habilitation work on the polarization and spectral properties of biphotons. In 1997-2009 she was several times a visiting professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (USA), at the University of Bari (Italy), and in the National Metrology Institute in Turin (Italy). Starting from 2009, she is a research group leader in Max-Planck Institute for the Science of Light. Starting from 2020, she also holds a part-time professor position at Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her research area is generation and application of nonclassical light, with a special focus on bright states of light manifesting quantum behavior, but also including single photons emitted by quantum dots and entangled photon pairs generated through different nonlinear effects.