Maria Paula Mendes is a researcher in Earth and Environmental Sciences at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST). Trained as a Water Resources Engineer at the University of Évora, she holds an MSc and a PhD in Earth Resources Engineering from Universidade de Lisboa.

Her work focuses on developing data-driven and predictive approaches to understand the dynamics, degradation, and performance of environmental, urban, and engineered systems under climatic and anthropogenic stressors. Her research integrates temporal analysis and heterogeneous datasets to characterise baseline conditions, detect change, and model system response under uncertainty.

She investigates how systems respond to climate variability and extreme events across applications such as drought propagation, ecosystem and water-resource dynamics, contamination pathways, urban heat dynamics, infrastructure performance, and the durability of sustainable and circular construction materials.