Maria Ștefania Ionel is a postdoctoral researcher at the Assessment and Individual Differences Lab (AID-Lab) and a teaching assistant at the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, University of Bucharest. She completed her PhD in Psychology (Summa Cum Laude, 2024, supervised by Prof. Laura Visu-Petra) at Babeș-Bolyai University with the thesis “Personality, Mental Health and Performance Anxiety in Outdoor Sports: The Case of Rock-Climbing”. Her research interests focus on personality as a predictor of exceptional performance, the benefits of practising sport in nature, and mental health in elite athletes. She is a member of the Romanian Olympic and Sports Committee’s (COSR) mental health working group and of the Medical & Anti-Doping Commission (World Climbing). She is also a clinical psychologist trained in CBT and Mastersonian psychodynamic psychotherapy.