Mª Mar Galindo Merino graduated with honors in Spanish Studies from the University of Alicante (Spain) in 2002. She specialized in Second Language Acquisition and the Teaching of Modern Languages at the University of Pennsylvania (2004) and in Spanish language teaching (ELE) in the Instituto Cervantes. She has taught Spanish in Spain, Austria, Turkey, Belgium, France, Brazil and the USA. She has published several articles, book chapters and reviews on General and Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics and Pragmatics.

Her PhD (2010) focused on translanguaging in the Spanish language classroom, and was partly developed at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa (USA). She was awarded the ASELE (Asociación para la Enseñanza de ELE) prize for excellence in research in 2011 and the Extraordinary doctorate prize in 2012. Her first book, La lengua materna en el aula de ELE (2012), was awarded the Young research prize 2013 of the Spanish Applied Linguistics Association (AESLA). Together with María Méndez, she has coordinated the ATLAS de ELE: Geolingüística la enseñanza del español en el mundo.

In 2007 she joined the Linguistics division of the University of Alicante, where she currently holds a Senior Lecturer position, teaching both General and Applied Linguistics. She has also been the coordinator of the Linguistics Division (2010 – 2012) and the secretary of the journal Estudios de Lingüística. UA (2009 – 2011). She has trained language teachers in different training courses and MA degrees (UIMP - Instituto Cervantes, UNEX, Alcalá de Henares, Salamanca, URV, Nebrija, Rutgers University, Columbia University). She has lectured in more than 20 countries.

In 2013 Mar Galindo was a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle Paris III in France and a postdoctoral resident in the Colegio de España, in the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris (CIUP). She also worked for the Instituto Cervantes in Paris. As a result, she developed a research project on the teaching of Spanish through Sports (2014 – 2016) funded by the University of Alicante and put into practice at the Instituto Cervantes in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). She is part of the AILA research network Applied Linguistics in Sport (2017 – 2020).

In 2016 she received a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (KAKENHI 15K02699) for the project “Studies about Teaching Methods and Class Activities Based on Guidelines for Spanish Learning” with the GIDE research group (Grupo de Investigación en Didáctica del Español) in several universities in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya.

As a member of the European COST Action Study Abroad Research in European Perspective (2016 – 2020) and the AILA research network Study Abroad and Language Learning (2014 – 2017), she has coordinated a research project on language learning during study abroad from a gender perspective, in cooperation with CIEE. As part of this research, in 2018 she was a Visiting Scholar in Barnard College, Columbia University in New York.

She belongs to the research group ACQUA (Research on Second and Foreign Language Acquisition at the UA) and is a member of the Institute for Research in Gender Studies (IUIEG) of the University of Alicante.