María Pereda is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Burgos, Spain. She is nowadays working in a research project entitled “Simulating the past to understand human behavior”. This a multi-disciplinary project where they work together engineers, sociologists and anthropologists to develop agent based model simulation to explore the influence of certain particular behaviors of prehistoric societies in the evolution and resilience of cooperation, some of them related to social dilemmas. She did graduate studies in Industrial Engineering, specialized in Electronics (2006) and Industrial Organisation Engineering (2008) at University of Burgos, Spain. She did M.Sc. studies in Research in Process Systems Engineering (2010) at the University of Valladolid, Spain. She received her Ph.D. in Process Systems Engineering (2014) from the University of Valladolid. Her most recent research focuses on agent-based modelling, machine learning and optimization techniques.