Brenda Lopez Silva is a senior staff member in the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Learning Sciences Research Institute, where she leads the Realization Lab for researching, designing, and implementing learning technologies and learning materials for formal and informal educational settings. In addition to her duties at UIC, Brenda is a member of the faculty of the Department of Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she teaches a course on immersive technologies. She has been awarded the US Fulbright scholarship 2020-2021 to teach and research VR in Lisbon, Portugal.

Brenda has produced several technology-based projects that have been exhibited at the Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, the Adler Planetarium and Museum of Astronomy, the SciTech Hands-On Museum, and the Alameda Art Laboratory in Mexico City. She has also been a guest researcher at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, where she conducted research on augmented reality and the impacts of embodied interactions on learning processes and physical efforts in children. She has published and presented her work at several international conferences and art festivals.

Brenda has an MFA in electronic visualization from the University of Illinois at Chicago, a BA in graphic design and communication from Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in México, and a post-baccalaureate degree in new technologies from Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in México.