Marcos Lopez

Marcos Lopez, Ph.D., is the Director of the Research Institute of the Puerto Rico Science, Technology, and Research Trust (PRSTRT) and the Research Manager of the Puerto Rico Public Health Trust. He is also the Director of the Puerto Rico COVID-19 Variant Surveillance Initiative, a genomic surveillance laboratory capacity for the Puerto Rico Department of Health. He is also a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao. He earned a BS in Chemistry in 2000 from the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao. Then, he completed a Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Akron and an NCI-NIH post-doctoral fellowship in Cancer Biology and Molecular Biophysics at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Before coming to the PRSTRT, he was the Director of Biotechnology, Innovation, and Technology Development and the Transplant Immunology and Immunogenetics Laboratory at the Cardiovascular Foundation of Colombia. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Lopez has helped position the PRSTRT at the forefront of the research response to COVID-19 health disparities by being a co-investigator of two Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics for Underserved Populations (RADx-UP) initiatives in Puerto Rico. In addition, he is the PI of an NCI Serological Sciences Network (SeroNet) U01 grant that aims to study the SARS-CoV-2 correlates of protection in a Latino-origin population. Also, he was commissioned to be part of the Scientific Coalition of Puerto Rico, a scientific advisory board to the Government of Puerto Rico established to guide the state-wide COVID-19 efforts. Since joining the Research Institute, Dr. Lopez has been cultivating the Institute's position on the cutting edge of the science of minority health and health disparities. Through this effort, the Institute aims to deliver resources that guide and facilitate research to transform health disparities into health equity in Puerto Rico. Dr. Lopez's research interests have focused on improving the health of individuals from racial and ethnic minority communities through effective prevention interventions and understanding underlying causes of health disparities. At the molecular level, his interests have centered on understanding the role of altered metabolic perturbations, mitochondrial bioenergetics, and redox cell regulation in human diseases, including cancer, inborn metabolic disorders in children, preeclampsia, and transplant immunology.