MARIA VINA LOPEZ

Maria Vina Lopez, originally from Santiago de Compostela, Spain, is a third year undergraduate student at the University of Maine majoring in Biology with Honors and minors in Mathematics and Neuroscience. She is currently doing her Honors Thesis on the epigenetics of aging at the Sinclair Lab at HMS. Her goal is to understand aging and how to reverse it and to also prevent the diseases it causes like Alzheimer's or Dementia. After graduating from UMaine in 2023, she plans to pursue a PhD.

At her university, she has also done medical research at the Wheeler lab for two years studying drug synergy effects on the fungi Candida albicans. Her project led her to present at the 2021 National Collegiate Research Conference held by Harvard University, the Bioscience Association of Maine Student Showcase in 2020 and 2021, and she was also awarded the 2021 CUGR Medicine Fellowship and presented in the UMaine Annual Symposium. 

Apart from her research efforts at UMaine, she has also done two summer research internships in 2019 and 2021 at the Higgins Lab at HSM to study the molecular basis of brain infection by intracellular bacterial pathogens. 

Maria has also enjoyed being the President of the UMaine chapter of Engineers without Borders and a secondary provider at the University Volunteer Ambulance Corps (UVAC) back in UMaine!