María Luisa Bonet Carbonell grew up and studied in Barcelona, Spain, until 1985 untiI she left for Berkeley with a Fullbright Fellowship. María Luisa obtained her PhD in Mathematics in 1991 at the University of California, Berkeley. She was supervised by Sam Buss on topics related to proof theory and proof complexity. For the following four years and a half, María Luisa had temporary positions at the University of California, San Diego (Warchawski Assistant Professorship), University of Pennsylvania, and the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) in New Jersey.

In 1996 María Luisa went back to Barcelona to work in the Computer Science department of the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya where she became a Professor in 2007.
For many years María Luisa worked in proof complexity, but in later years she has been interested in Satisfiability and MaxSAT, usually from a theoretical point of view.