Dr. López received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Texas A&M University in 2015. Afterwards she was awarded the Carlos E. Castañeda Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Mexican American Studies at The University of Texas from 2015-2016. Currently, she is an assistant professor in the department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and an affiliate in the Center for Mexican American Studies and the department of psychology. Dr. López is also the director of the LLAMA: Psycholinguistic and Sociolinguistic Laboratory.
Dr. López’s research program focuses on bilingualism; particularly on how knowing and using multiple languages can shape cognition in terms of creativity, problem solving, decision-making, and language access. While studying Spanish-English bilinguals in the United States, especially Latina/os in the southwestern United States, she observed that bilinguals are not homogeneous. For this reason, Dr. López became interested in observing individual differences within bilinguals. She examines how early linguistic and cultural experiences (e.g., informal translation) have long-term cognitive and linguistic outcomes. She is committed to expanding the current psycholinguistic literature on bilingualism to include more individual differences in the areas of creativity, code-switching, cross-language activation, decision-making, and problem solving. Dr. López’s goals is to conduct research that better understands how early language experiences, particularly in Latinx communities, can affect the way language is processed, stored, and retrieved, while understanding how language use also affects cognition. Other interests include: humor, semantics, figurative language, creativity, and Latinx psychology.