Profile Details
As the associate director for science at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Dr. Mercedes López-Morales is responsible for oversight of the research infrastructure as well as its external science policies, including the Telescope Allocation Committee (TAC) process for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and the development of science policies and peer review for JWST and the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Before joining the institute, she served as the deputy associate director for science and a senior astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), where she worked to enable research for over 300 scientists while also conducting exoplanet research.
As an educator, Dr. López-Morales has supervised more than 30 postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and undergraduates. She also contributed as a lecturer at Harvard. While leading the CfA public affairs office, she coordinated press releases and facilitated the engagement of CfA scientists with members of the media. She has also participated in more than 100 public and professional presentations, documentaries, television appearances, and press releases.
Dr. López-Morales has spent a significant portion of her career as a researcher. Before she joined the CfA in 2012, she served as a Spanish Government Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the Institut de Ciències de l’Espai (CSIC-IEEC) in Barcelona, Spain for two years. From 2004 to 2010, Dr. López-Morales split her time as a NASA Astrobiology Institute Fellow and then a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in the District of Columbia. She started her career as a museum and planetarium coordinator at the Observatorio Arturo Duperier in Lanzarote, Spain in 1997.
As a researcher, Dr. López-Morales has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications. She is interested in the physical and chemical properties of exoplanets, both as individual objects and as a population, with the goal of unveiling how planets form and evolve and what parameters determine their observed properties. She uses JWST, HST, and ground-based telescopes to measure planetary masses, and study the atmospheres of exoplanets with transmission and emission spectroscopy. She also has experience with robotic instrumentation and stellar astrophysics.
Service to the astronomical community is central to Dr. López-Morales’s work. She is currently co-chair of the Ground-Based Astronomy in the 2030s/2040s working group for the Habitable Worlds Observatory, a concept for NASA’s next astrophysics flagship mission. She has served on the HST and JWST user committees, in the HST Financial Review Committee (FRC), and in the JWST Cycle 1 FRC working group. She also served on the HST and NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) exoplanet initiative working group, and the HST Dual Anonymous Peer Review working group. She was co-chair of the Magellan Telescopes Science Advisory Committee from 2013 to 2017, a member of the Calar Alto Observatory Science Advisory Committee between 2020 and 2022, and has been a member of the Science Advisory Committee for the GMT Multi-object Astronomical and Cosmological Spectrograph (GMACS) instrument since 2022.
Education:
PhD in Astronomy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
MS in Astronomy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
BS in in Physics, University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain
Research Interests: Comparative Atmospheric Planetology, Exomoons, Exoplanets, Exoplanet Atmospheres, Exoplanet Composition, Exoplanet Formation, Exoplanet Population Studies, Neural Networks
ORCID ID: 0000-0003-3204-8183