Cristina Lopes received an outstanding Alumni Award from Northeastern on October 29 for her doctoral dissertation titled ” D: A Language framework for Distributed Programming,” work that is considered the foundation of Aspect-oriented programming (AOP). The award is given to alumni “whose professional attainment and service to community bring honor to themselves and to the University.”
While working on her PhD, Lopes became a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where she joined Gregor Kiczales’ team, which developed AOP further and started aspectj.org. Aspectj is the first production-quality general-purpose AOP language.
In 2002, Lopes left Xerox PARC to join the faculty of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California Irvine. Lopes is currently pursuing two areas of research: exploring audio channels for several purposes, including short range communications in ubiquitous computing; and exploring how certain mechanisms in natural languages can be used to design more expressive programming languages to make programs become more understandable.
