Maria Rita Palattella holds a bachelor’s degree in Telecommunication Engineering (2004) and a master’s degree in Telecommunication Engineering (2007), both with honor, from Politecnico di Bari, Italy. She obtained her PhD in Electronics Engineering from ``Scuola Interpolitecnica di Dottorato'' (SIPD) and Politecnico di Bari, Italy, in February 2011. From 2011 to 2016, she was a Research Associate at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) at the University of Luxembourg.  She contributed to the design of MAC protocols and energy-efficient scheduling algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks. She was involved in several EU FP7 and H2020 projects, including OUTSMART, IoT6, F-Interop. In 2016, she joined the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) as a Senior Research and Technology Associate. Since October 2024, she has been a Principal Scientist, leading the work on the design of innovative communication systems and network architectures for different IoT applications, with a focus on digital agriculture. Her current research interest focuses on IoT-NTN, and she has contributed to this research topic through several projects: ESA ITT M2MSAT, FNR LORSAT, SMC Lux5GCloud, SatNex V ONION, and INVENTIVE. She is also the PI of the projects HEU COMMECT, GEH LIFE and FNR 5G-AGROBOT.