Cristina (Crista) Lopes, who received her PhD in computer science from Northeastern University in 1998, can often be found working on multiple projects spanning programming languages and compilers, code duplication detection, analytics of very large code bases, search engines, Internet technologies, open source development, and games and virtual worlds. “I have a serious case of wanting to do many things at the same time,” Lopes said. “I pursue everything that I find interesting.”

As a PhD student studying under Karl Lieberherr at Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Lopes pioneered research into aspect-oriented programming, a way of organizing code to group similar aspects of a program together. After a summer internship working on aspect-oriented programming with the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Lopes was invited to extend her internship and soon moved to Palo Alto to continue her work with PARC during the last two years of her PhD.

In 2008, Lopes became a co-developer on OpenSimulator, an open source version of the 3D virtual world called Second Life. OpenSimulator allows individuals and companies to run their own virtual environments and has since been used in a variety of applications from urban planning and medical training to advanced military simulations and, one of Lopes’s personal interests, education. For her work on the project, Lopes became the first woman to receive the prestigious Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest in March 2016.

Over the years, Lopes’s work has reconnected her with Northeastern through collaborations with Khoury professors. Lopes had the opportunity to work with Jan Vitek, Professor of Computer Science, on a project funded by DARPA, which used large data sets of source code to test machine learning approaches to software program syntheses, a precursor to today’s large language models in software.

Then, in 2020, as the global pandemic shut down in-person conferences, the work that Lopes had already been doing in the virtual conference space grew more critical. At that time, she and Jon Bell, an assistant professor at Northeastern, had been in the process of organizing the ICSE 2020 conference. They shifted their work to prototyping a solution in open source, and over the course of a few months they had developed a browser-based virtual conference platform. The new platform, called Clowdr (now Midspace), supported not only ICSE 2020 but also a dozen other conferences in the next few months.

I strive to do things in open source as much as possible. As a professor, I feel that it’s my responsibility to leave something to the public and to the rest of the world

Crista Lopes, PhD in Computer Science ’98

As evidenced by her prolific work as an open source developer, Lopes is a staunch advocate for working in open source. She considers it a part of the public infrastructure that’s critical to communities. “I strive to do things in open source as much as possible,” Lopes said. “As a professor, I feel that it’s my responsibility to leave something to the public and to the rest of the world.”

Crista Lopes is currently the Chancellor’s Professor of Software Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, and Director of the Professional Master program in Software Engineering. From her time as a graduate student at Khoury, to her current research and work as a professor, and even her efforts as an expert witness in legal cases related to software artifacts, what unities all of her work is her love of building new things, reflecting on the building process, and sharing her learning with others.

In addition to the Pizzigati Prize, Lopes has won numerous honors and awards for her research, including the 2004 Distinguished Alumni Award from Northeastern University.