Marija supports the Household Economic Security and Equity focal area of Regional & Community Outreach, which pursues three goals: reducing the racial wealth gap, increasing family resiliency, and reducing the overreliance on debt. For the decade before she joined the Bank in 2017, Marija worked at the nexus of applied research and community engagement on issues of poverty alleviation, housing stability and homelessness, economic mobility, and discrimination, with the focus on low/moderate-income and historically marginalized communities—both domestically and internationally. She earned her PhD from the McCormack Graduate School of Global and Policy Studies at UMASS Boston, where her dissertation focused on labor market discrimination of Roma people in Serbia.