Already during his studies he participated in excavations in Israel and Peru, where he learned to combine methods of computer science and humanities.

Early on, he participated in the development of new methods here, such as for 3D recording of ancient pottery for the Austrian Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum.

He received his doctorate in 2012, after which Mara founded the Forensic Computational Geometry Laboratory (FCGL or FCGLab), also at Heidelberg University.

He leads the FCGLab, which was funded as a junior research group by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under the 2nd German Universities Excellence Initiative from 2014 to 2020.

He is an Editor-in-Chief of the it - Information Technology journal series at De Gruyter,[8] which is one of the oldest publication media of computer science in Germany.