Maria Grazia Manera is researcher of the National Research Council at the Microelectronics and Microsystems Institute (IMM-CNR) unit of Lecce—Italy. Her education degrees lie in the field of Physics and in particular Material Science and new applied technologies. Her research interests lie in the area of optical characterization of organic and inorganic materials for optochemical sensing and biosensing applications exploiting surface plasmon-based transduction methodologies. She has been involved also in the study and functional characterization of metal oxide based gas sensors, particularly when exposed to light illumination. Currently her interests are sweeping also in the functional characterization of magneto-plasmonic materials as novel magneto-optical transducing platforms for improving the gas and bio-sensing performances of standard surface plasmon resonance sensors. Novel research interests explored are in the area of plasmon-enhanced spectroscopies for materials science characterization and for functional devices development. She participated to several European and Italian research projects mainly focused on the same topics providing the coordination of some of them as a Principal Investigator