Maria Liz Crespo has been an assistant professor at the National University of San Luis (UNSL), Argentina, from 1994 to 2000. She got her PhD from UNSL in 2004, developing the thesis at the ICTP in collaboration with the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN). Her PhD thesis was on real-time data acquisition and processing of the 83000-channel RICH-1 detector of COMPASS experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). She has been a post-doc at the INFN (2003 - 2004) and then at the ICTP (2005 - 2007). Successively, she has been a research officer at the MLab of ICTP.

She is currently a research scientist at ICTP (STI MLab) and the scientific coordinator of MLab. She is also an associate researcher of INFN and a member of the COMPASS/AMBER collaboration at CERN.

She has organized more than 30 international schools and workshops, and supervised several postgraduate and PhD students. She is a co-author of more than 150 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings.