Dr. Lopez is the Theodore and Bertha Bryan Professor of Environmental Medicine and BJC Investigator in the Department of Molecular Microbiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. She is a mother of two now adult boys. She arrived in the United States in 1996 after obtaining a professional title of Biochemist and a Master’s degree in Biomedical Sciences from the Pontificia Universidad Católica of Chile. She received a Ph.D. from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in NY working in the laboratory of Thomas Moran (1997-2002), and continued in the same laboratory for a postdoctoral position. At the Moran lab, she investigated how dendritic cells get activated in response to infection with influenza  and parainfluenza viruses and studied the impact of type I interferons on the immune response to viral infection.  She was promoted to Research Assistant Professor in 2005. She joined the Faculty of the University of Pennsylvania for her first independent position in September of 2010, and was promoted to tenured Associate Professor in May of 2016. She joined Washington University as Professor and BJC Investigator in June of 2020.

She’s been an active member of the American Association of Immunologists (AAI), where she gave the Immunology to Viruses lecture in the International AAI Introductory Course in Immunology (2012-2013), served as member of the Committee on the Status of Women (2012-2015), and was a member of the Program Committee (2017-2020). She’s a member of the American Society for Virology (ASV) and of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) where she was on the Council on Microbial Sciences (2017-2020) and chaired Division E (Immunology). She’s a member of the NIH CSR VIRB study section,  Section Editor of PloS Pathogens, Associate Editor of Science Advances and Editor of mBio. She is a Fellow of the Professional Mentoring Skills Enhancing Diversity (PROMISED) Program funded by the NIH-National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN), a Penn Fellow (2017-18), a Fulbright US Scholar (2018-2019) and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (2022).