Maria-Paola Forte received her BSc degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Genova in 2015 with the thesis "Crowd Motion Analysis using Optical Flow."

In 2018, she earned her MSc degree in Bioengineering (Technologies for Electronics) at Politecnico di Milano. During this time, she participated in an exchange program at the University of Queensland (Brisbane) and conducted her master's thesis research, "Robust Visual Augmented Reality in Robot-Assisted Surgery," at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems under Dr. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker's supervision.

Currently, Forte is an IMPRS-IS Ph.D. Candidate working across two departments at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems: the Haptic Intelligence Department led by Dr. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker and the Perceiving Systems Department led by Dr. Michael J. Black. Her PhD thesis, "An Interdisciplinary Approach to Human Pose Estimation: Application to Sign Language," advances her work in creating assistive technology.

At the core of Forte's research is the development of technology that meaningfully assists people, particularly those with sensory or motor deficits. Through her work on Sign Language Capture, she combines vision-based and sensor-based approaches. Beyond this focus, she investigates how technology can enhance performance in highly specialized contexts, such as robotic surgery, drawing on her interdisciplinary expertise in engineering, computer vision, and human-computer interaction.