Mercedes López-Morales

Mercedes López-Morales
Born	Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain
Nationality	Spanish
Citizenship	American
Alma mater	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Known for	Discovery and characterization of Exoplanets
Scientific career
Fields	Exoplanet astrophysics
Institutions	Harvard & Smithsonian
Notable students	Munazza Alam, Chantanelle Nava

Mercedes López-Morales is a Spanish-American astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who works on detection and characterization of exoplanet atmospheres.

Education and career

López-Morales studied physics during her undergraduate program at Universidad de La Laguna, in the Canary Islands, Spain. She received her PhD in astronomy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2004. After completing her doctoral degree, she was a Carnegie postdoctoral fellow from 2004 until 2010 at the Carnegie Science Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) in Washington, DC. During her tenure at the Carnegie Science DTM, López-Morales was also a postdoc at the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI). In 2007, López-Morales was awarded a Hubble Fellowship. While at the NAI, she worked on two different projects, From Molecular Clouds to Habitable Planetary Systems and Looking Outward: Studies of the Physical and Chemical Evolution of Planetary Systems.

Work

Between 2010 and 2012, López-Morales returned to Spain to join the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, Spain, where she was awarded a prestigious Ramón y Cajal Fellowship. She joined the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in 2012. In 2014–2015, she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where she worked on Searching for Atmospheric Signatures of Other Worlds.

López-Morales is currently the Deputy Associate Director for Science at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, where she also leads the Exoplanet Spectroscopy Survey (ACCESS) project where she investigates optical properties of exoplanet atmospheres using spectroscopy techniques. She is also Co-PI of the PanCET project, the largest exoplanet atmospheres program awarded time on the Hubble Space Telescope. López-Morales's work also focuses on the discovery and characterization of terrestrial exoplanets using HARPS-N, a high-resolution optical spectrograph with broad wavelength coverage located in the Northern hemisphere.