Maria Calsamiglia, DVM, PhD, has been involved in research for ten years and has been a science teacher for 15 years. During those teaching years, she has implemented and coordinated the IB at her school and has directed science excellence programs for motivated high school students . In the last two and a half years, she has been involved in an ERC project developing and implementing indicators for socioemotional skills (SES) assessment in school and university settings. A spin off, Pentabilities, has emerged from that research project, where she is co-founder. Pentabilities offers tools to track socioemotional skills through developmental cycles and a methodology to help educators create the right class environments to do so.
She works closely with teachers to help them implement strategies that allow SES to surface, to collect evidences of their development and give appropriate feedback to students to establish the SES learning cycle.