College of Liberal and Fine Arts

Biography

Dr. Lopez earned his bachelor's degree in psychology from The University of Texas, where he worked for 4 years in the research laboratory of Abram Amsel, one of the leading theorists in behaviorism.  He completed an honors project in Dr. Amsel's lab studying the Pavlovian conditioning of the orienting response in very young rats. 

Dr. Lopez earned a master of science and doctoral degree in experimental physiological psychology from the University of Texas at Arlington, under the guidance of Verne C. Cox.  His graduate research studied the role of supraspinal neural pathways in mediating analgesia for tonic pain.  The work that Dr. Lopez did at UT Arlington has served as the foundation for several prolific programs of research investigating the nature of pain, work which continues to this day.  Following his graduate studies, Dr. Lopez worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, working in the area of pharmacology.  His work there was concerned with understanding the role of serotonin in mediating depression and anxiety. 

Dr Lopez left academia in 1997 to pursue other opportunities.  Currently, he is an Advisory Software Engineer with IBM, Watson & Cloud Platform. Prior to working at IBM, Dr. Lopez worked in the non-profit sector, was a managing consultant with IBM Global Services, a consultant with EDS, and technology director for a couple of dotcoms. While working for these companies, Dr. Lopez worked on a very wide variety of projects with many different clients throughout the world.

He is happily married and has two great kids.

My two greatest influences in my career in psychology:

Dr. Verne C. Cox UT Arlington		Dr. Abram Amsel UT Austin

Degrees

• Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, University of Texas at Arlington (1993)
• M.S. in Experimental Psychology, University of Texas at Arlington (1992)
• B.A. in Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin (1986)