Mercedes López-Morales

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

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 2011 at the Carnegie Science Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) inWashington, 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.

Between 2011 and 2012, López-Morales returned to Spain as a researcher at the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, Spain., and was awarded a prestigious Ramón y Cajal Fellowship. She joined the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics 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.

At the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, López-Morales is the Co-PI (with Daniel Apai) of the Exoplanet Spectroscopy Survey (ACCESS) project where she investigates optical properties of exoplanet atmospheres using spectroscopy techniques. 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.