Dr. Ana Cristina O. Lopes

Ana Cristina was faculty at the University of Virginia and UNC Greensboro, and she has taught at RYI Austria and Stanford University, where she is Visiting Fellow at the Center for South Asia. She is the author of Tibetan Buddhism in Diaspora (Routledge, 2015). Ana Cristina received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Sao Paulo and her MA in Buddhist Studies from Columbia University. She studied Classical Tibetan as part of her PhD research, in postdocs at Columbia and Harvard universities, and at Rangjung Yeshe Institute. 

Born on International Translation Day, Ana Cristina always knew she wanted to learn languages, and she fell in love with Tibetan as soon as she encountered it in her studies at Columbia. She developed her Tibetan language skills while pursuing her scholarly studies of the Tibetan diaspora in the field of anthropology, and she later had a chance to deepen her knowledge of Tibetan at RYI in Nepal and in her post-doctoral study. She came into her dream job at 84000 through her collaboration with the Dharmachakra Translation Committee. Translating the sūtras, in particular the Buddhāvataṃsakasūtra, has opened new universes for her, and she cannot wait to find out where else it leads.