Graduate Student
Department of Astronomy
Alejandra Lopez Holguin grew up in a small town in Durango, Mexico. She has a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from Instituto Tecnológico de Durango (ITD). She pursued a master’s degree in Astrophysics at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), followed by a master’s degree in Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison). She is currently a third-year PhD student in Astronomy at UW-Madison. Alejandra’s research area is Astrochemistry, which is the study of the chemistry that occurs in space. Her work combines laboratory spectroscopy and astronomical observations to study molecules in star-forming regions. She is particularly interested in complex organic molecules, as some of these molecules are thought to be precursors of the building blocks of life on Earth.