It never ceases to amaze me how deeply personally satisfactory it feels to do something you thought you could never do. Having had knee troubles for many years (me and my knee troubles go back years, all the way back to when I fractured my kneecap in a cycling accident), even as I was running 1/2 marathons and triathlons, I was sure that full marathons were not for me. Too much pounding. Too much pain. No, definitely not for me.
And — I did it! Did it did it did it! Philadelphia marathon 2012, 4:04. Beautiful day and a wonderfully organized race. Philly has a special place in my heart as the first US city I visited, so running my first marathon here was really fitting. And I ran my very first marathon in the T-shirt I got at my first ever running race, the 2008 Newport 10K. And my knee was absolutely fine, too (although getting it to be fine with this distance took years of work).
Past the race: I’m a marathoner!
About Maria Gorlatova
Dr. Maria Gorlatova is the Sternberg Family Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. Her research centers on pervasive computing technologies, with a focus on spatial computing and next-generation augmented reality. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and her M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees (Summa Cum Laude) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada. She spent two years at Princeton University’s Electrical Engineering Department as an Associate Research Scholar and Associate Director of the Princeton University EDGE Lab. Dr. Gorlatova was named one of the N2Women Rising Stars and has received multiple awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), the DARPA Director’s Fellowship, the IEEE ISMAR 2025 Best Paper Award, the IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communications, and research awards from Meta, Cisco, and IBM. She served as the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE IPSN 2023, the General Co-Chair of the 2025 NSF Workshop on Networking and Systems Challenges in Immersive Computing, and the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE SenSys 2025.
