Professor María Yira Figueroa Olvera holds a Bachelor's Degree in Administration and a Master's Degree in International Relations Studies from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She also has a Master's degree in International Economics and Development and is a Ph.D. Candidate in Economics from the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain.
She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Political and Social Sciences at UNAM with 100 percent of credits completed. During her graduate studies and research stays abroad, she has been distinguished as a fellow of the National Council of Science and Technology in 2001-2010; the Latin America High-Level Researchers Program in 2005-2008 (currently Erasmus Mundus) and as a visiting researcher at the University of Newcastle in the United Kingdom in 2009.

Her work experience in public and private sectors has been in Mexico and Spain as a business consultant in the period 2008-2013, where she developed sectoral economic studies and other projects to promote business development, foreign trade, and foreign investment from Latin American countries to the European Union, collaborating in Prointec (Spain), La Conserjería Comercial de México en España and Consultores Internacionales S.C. (Mexico).

In teaching and research, she has been a Lecturer in the Open University and Distance Education System of the Faculty of Accounting and Administration UNAM, from 2004 to the present.
In 2018, she joined the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) Iztapalapa Campus as a Professor and Associate Researcher Level D, Full-Time, Definitive, in the Division of Social Sciences and Humanities, Department of Economics, a position she obtained as the winner of an open competition.

Her main lines of research are:
Foreign direct investment in developing countries, with particular attention to the case of Mexico in the financial and electricity sectors.
Analysis of the sectoral effects of multinational companies in developing countries and public policies in the labor market and higher education in Mexico.

Current research projects:
Foreign direct investment in Mexico. An analysis of its effects on the (financial) services sector (UAM).
Multinational companies of Spanish origin in the electricity sector in Mexico. Effects from the 2013 energy reform (Doctoral thesis UNAM).
Other activities: Representative of the General Rector of the UAM in the Technical Advisory Committee of the Economics Career, in the General Directorate of Professions of the Ministry of Public Education.