Prior to being in Academia, she worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (1995-2001). She is most known as co-inventor of AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming). She also made contributions to Ubiquitous Computing research with her work on lightweight software acoustic modems that encode small amounts of data in socially-acceptable sounds. She is the recipient of several NSF grants, including a prestigious CAREER Award. Dr. Lopes has a PhD from Northeastern University, and MS and BS degrees from Instituto Superior Tecnico in Portugal.