Bio

Dr. Mercado Oropeza is a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. There, she heads the AI Lab for Molecular Engineering, where she and her team seek to bridge methods from machine learning and the life sciences to engineer molecular systems for therapeutic applications, focusing on new AI method development. Previously, she was a postdoctoral associate in the Coley group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as an industrial postdoc in the Molecular AI team at AstraZeneca. Throughout her independent career, she’s worked on the development of deep generative models for small molecule drug discovery, and she is passionate about the development of AI-based methods for engineering novel therapeutics and materials. Before AstraZeneca, she was a PhD student in Berend Smit’s molecular simulation groups at UC Berkeley and EPFL, receiving her PhD in 2018. Prior to this, she received a BSc in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 2013. Her group’s research is highly interdisciplinary and aims to bridge methods from AI, informatics, and computational chemistry to tackle problems at the forefront of molecular engineering.

Last updated: December 2025

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