Mercedes López-Morales is a Spanish-American astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Maryland, who works on detection and characterization of exoplanet atmospheres.

[1][2] López-Morales studied physics during her undergraduate program at Universidad de La Laguna, in the Canary Islands, Spain.

[2] In 2014–2015, she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where she worked on Searching for Atmospheric Signatures of Other Worlds.

[1] Between 2016-2022 she was Co-PI of the PanCET project, the largest exoplanet atmospheres program awarded time on the Hubble Space Telescope.

López-Morales' work also focuses on the discovery and characterization of terrestrial exoplanets using HARPS-N, a high-resolution optical spectrograph with broad wavelength coverage installed at the Telescopopio Nazionale Galileo in the Canary Islands, Spain.