Mª Mar Galindo Merino holds a degree in Hispanic Philology (1998–2002, Academic Achievement Award from the Valencian Regional Government) and a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Alicante (2010; Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award). She also holds a master’s degree in Feminist, Gender and Citizenship Studies from the Universitat Jaume I (UJI) and is a graduate of the Mastery Program at the School of Womanly Arts in New York (2019). She completed part of her predoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania (USA, 2004), specializing in Applied Linguistics and second language acquisition. She received training in teaching Spanish at the Cervantes Institute and has taught classes, given lectures, and delivered training courses in more than twenty countries. She has published several articles, book chapters, and reviews on language teaching and Spanish Applied Linguistics.

Her doctoral research, on learning Spanish as a foreign language (ELE), was partly carried out at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (USA, 2006). Its originality and rigor earned her the ASELE Research Award (2011) for the best doctoral dissertation, which led to her book La lengua materna en el aula de ELE (2012), winner of the Young Researcher Award of the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics (AESLA, 2013). She has co-coordinated the ATLAS del ELE: Geolingüística de la enseñanza de español en el mundo (2017, 2022) and La lingüística del amor (2022).

Since 2007 she has been a professor of General Linguistics at the University of Alicante and has been a visiting professor in various master’s programs and specialist degrees. She has served as secretary of the journal Estudios de Lingüística. Universidad de Alicante and as associate editor of the journal Feminismo/s.

In 2013 she was a visiting researcher at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III (France), a postdoctoral resident at the Colegio de España, and a teacher at the Cervantes Institute in Paris. From that stay emerged a research project in Applied Linguistics focused on teaching Spanish through sports (2014–2016). She has worked in this field within the international network Applied Linguistics in Sport (2017–2024). In another AILA (International Association of Applied Linguistics) research network, Study Abroad and Language Learning, she led a project on language learning in study abroad programs and gender perspectives, in collaboration with CIEE—research that led her to serve as a Visiting Research Scholar at Barnard College, Columbia University in New York, in 2018. She was also a member of the European COST Action Study Abroad Research in European Perspective (2016–2020) and a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge, England (2022).

In the 2022–2023 academic year, she returned to New York thanks to a research project funded by the European Commission and the NextGenerationEU program on equality, diversity, and inclusion in higher education.

More recently, she has worked with Aarón Pérez and Zsuzanna Bárkányi on the PRONUNTIA project (2021–2024), which led to the book La integración de la pronunciación en el aula de ELE (John Benjamins, 2024). She is currently a researcher in the DAELA project (Academic Discourse in Spanish as an Additional Language, 2024–2027), directed by Susana Pastor.