Initially trained as a chemical engineer, in 2005, Habibović obtained a PhD degree from the University of Twente, the Netherlands on the topic of materials for biomedical applications. Following postdoctoral research at Children’s Hospital Boston and McGill University, in 2008, she started her research group at the University of Twente. In 2014, she moved to Maastricht University. The main focus of her research is on synthetic bone graft substitutes, bioinorganics, nanomaterials for theranostics in regenerative medicine and high-throughput approaches in biomaterials research. For her research she received prestigious Veni, Vidi, Aspasia and Gravitation grants of the Dutch Research Council NWO, among other external research funds. 

She served as the President of the European Society for Biomaterials between 2017 and 2021 and as an Associate Editor of the RSC journal Biomaterials Science between 2019 and 2022. In 2017, she received the Jean Leray Award of the European Society for Biomaterials and in 2021 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. She has published over 100 peer-review articles on the topic of biomaterials and regenerative medicine.