Mara completed her doctorate at the University of Lagos and her postdoctoral training at the Donders Institute in Nijmegen, where she specialized in ultra-high-field neuroimaging. She joined the Institute in 2021 to work on the Predictive Cortex project, bringing particular expertise in the acquisition and analysis of laminar fMRI data. Her current work focuses on identifying the cortical layers that carry feedback signals in the visual hierarchy — a technically demanding question that requires both the Institute's 3T facility and her own analysis pipeline, which she has released as part of the Open Cognitive Models library.