• 2020 STEM Hero •
Jennifer
Lopez, Ph.D.
Research Mathematician & Team Lead, Sensors Directorate, Multi-Domain Sensing Autonomy Division, Sensing Management Branch,
U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory
U.S. Air Force
Dr. Jennifer Lopez is a research mathematician for the Air Force Research Laboratory Sensors Directorate Multi‐Domain Sensing Autonomy Division. She is the lead mathematician for the Multi‐domain Analytics Development & Evaluation team for the Sensing Management Branch.
Responsible for defining fundamental research efforts, developing experiments, and managing a 30-member team, Dr. Lopez is assessing hierarchical organizational models to understand human-machine workflow of small sample sizes as one of only two people in her division studying Patterns of Life.
Her research is unique in its approach of pushing the state-of-the-art in Autonomy, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence for all of the DoD and the Intelligence Community.
Dr. Lopez currently helps manage a $10 million per year portfolio that consists of 17 sub-projects while working closely with academia to maintain her expertise and produce valuable research, including two publications to date and three more currently in progress.
With a doctorate from the Air Force Institute of Technology, this daughter of Chinese and Mexican-American parents is a former DoD Science Mathematics and Research for Transformation Fellow—one of the first 11 nation-wide since the inception of this prestigious award. She is also a National Institutes of Health grant recipient and Civilian Advanced Degree Placement (CADP) recipient.