Tania Lopez-Silva

Research

Professor Tania Lopez-Silva designs advanced biomaterials that mimic and interact with the immune system and other biological environments. Her research focuses on supramolecular hydrogels—soft materials made from self-assembling molecules, often peptides. She has explored how the chemical functionality and design of peptide hydrogels influence their biological activity and host immune response, specifically in areas like tissue regeneration, wound healing, and cancer immunotherapy. Her work combines supramolecular chemistry, peptide chemistry, immunology, and materials science to develop new materials that address critical health challenges and enable advanced bioengineering models.

Her group, the Immunomodulatory Biomimetic Materials (IMBM) Lab at MIT, focuses on three main areas: 1) understanding key factors, properties, and interactions that allow materials to control biological systems; 2) integrating that knowledge for the targeted rational design of bioactive materials, initially focusing on materials for immunomodulation; and 3) developing advanced biomaterials for a range of biomedical applications, including cancer immunotherapy, cell-based therapeutics, and tissue engineering.

Biography

Professor Lopez-Silva earned her B.S. in chemistry from Tecnológico de Monterrey in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2014. She went on to receive her M.A. and Ph.D. in chemistry from Rice University in Houston in 2020, where her doctoral research focused on expanding the chemical diversity and understanding the biological activity of peptide nanostructured materials.

Before joining the DMSE faculty in July 2025, she served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Cancer Institute, where she developed novel materials for therapeutics delivery and evaluated how material properties—specifically charge—affected the immune response to peptide hydrogels.