Dr. Maria del Mar Vanrell is an assistant professor in the Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics at the University of the Balearic Islands. She currently serves as the principal investigator of the research group GRESIB (Research Group on Sociolinguistics in the Balearic Islands) and as the secretary of IRIE (Institute of Research and Educational Innovation). She earned her Bachelor's Degree in Catalan Philology from the University of the Balearic Islands in 2003 and subsequently worked for two years as an associate lecturer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. In September 2006 she defended her Master's thesis, followed by her Ph.D. dissertation in September 2011, both at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. From October 2011 to September 2013, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher within the Alliance 4U program at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Following this period, she held a postdoc/instructor position until September 2016 in the Department of Romance Philology at the Free University of Berlin.

Her research spans various fields, including language variation, contact, and change. She focuses on the grammatical interfaces of prosody-pragmatics and prosody syntax, as well as the L1/Ln acquisition of these interfaces. In recent years, Vanrell has also dedicated some of her research to describing the sociolinguistic situation in the Balearic Islands, with a particular emphasis on language attitudes and ideologies, and the social dimension of language variation. Dr. Vanrell has an extensive research track record with more than 100 publications, including 6 edited books, 15 articles in ISI JCR journals, 24 book chapters, 31 conference papers with ISBN, and 35 papers published in non-ISI JCR journals. She has delivered invited talks at seminars in different institutions (University of Cologne, Goethe University Frankfurt, Spanish National Research Council) and over 100 presentations at national and international conferences (Speech Prosody, International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology). In 2010, she received the Best Student Paper award at Speech Prosody 2010 (Chicago, USA), and in 2015, she was awarded the extraordinary Ph.D. prize (Ph.D. program: Cognitive Science and Language; Autonomous University of Barcelona). Dr. Vanrell has been recognized for two six-year periods of outside assessment of research activity (sexenios de investigación) (2008-2013, 2014-2019).

She has maintained continuous participation (2009-2023) in research projects funded by the Spanish National Research Plan and European institutions such as the British Academy of Sciences. Between May 2022 and May 2023, Dr. Vanrell served as the Principal Investigator (PI) for the project "Language Attitudes and Uses by Youngsters in the Balearic Islands". This study was contracted by the Council of European Funding, University, and Culture in the Government of the Balearic Islands to provide professional services to the Public Administration. Following the completion of the project, a book titled Actituds i usos lingüístics dels joves de les Illes Balears was published by the University of the Balearic Islands and the General Directorate of Language Policy in the Government of the Balearic Islands (see below). The coordination of the book was carried out by Dr. Vanrell along with Prof. Xisca Castell and Dr. Elga Cremades. This publication will serve as the foundation for the development of language and education policies in the Balearic Islands.