Dr. Guadalupe López-Íñiguez is a Spanish researcher, musician, and educator based in Finland. Her main goals as an academic are to support music students at all levels of the music education system in their physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development, and to help performing musicians in building a thriving career as game changers in society. Guadalupe holds a permanent position as a University Researcher in the fields of instrumental pedagogy and performance science at Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki, where she supports doctoral candidates to undertake inspiring projects related to music education.
Guadalupe has led multiple research projects as a PI since 2009; as an Academy Research Fellow appointed by the Research Council of Finland, she is currently leading the project “The Politics of Care in the Professional Education of Children Gifted for Music” (2022-2027) – a large-scale project of a global outreach to support children gifted for music to live as agentic and healthy individuals while pursuing desirable educational outcomes in caring ecosystems. In recognition of her contributions to the psychology of music education, Guadalupe has been awarded several international prizes and has received honorific titles from the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (Honorary Senior Fellow) and the Sibelius Academy (Docent, i.e. Associate Professor habilitation).
Guadalupe is co-editor of “Learning and Teaching in the Music Studio – A Student-Centred Approach" (Springer, 2022), and “Research Perspectives on Music Education in Ibero-America” (Routledge, 2025), and has published multiple peer-reviewed articles and book chapters with leading publishers. She is internationally sought-after to serve as a distinguished speaker as well as an expert for academic journals, doctoral committees, scientific conferences, and funding bodies. In addition to the field of gifted education in music, her research expertise includes constructivist pedagogy and conceptual change, musicians’ employability and careers, identity and lifelong learning, and wellbeing, as well as music performance optimisation and theories of emotion and motivation.
Some of Guadalupe's current leadership roles include being member of ISME’s Commission for the Education of the Professional Musician (CEPROM), and the Finnish Union of University Researchers and Teachers' Information field and open science-working group (FUURT). Guadalupe has previously served, for example, as Co-Editor in Chief of ISME’s Spanish language journal “Revista Internacional de Educación Musical” (2020-2024), Co-Chair of CEPROM (2022-2024), member of the European Association of Conservatoires’ Artists as Makers in Society project (AEC's ARTEMIS; 2022-2024), and Vice-President of the Spanish Society for Music Psychology and Music Performance (2019-2021).
As a professional musician herself, Guadalupe knows the music performance field from within. She holds a Master’s degree in classical music performance and, given her current research and academic responsibilities, she plays public concerts on baroque, classical, and modern cellos just on an occasional basis. Alba Records released her critically acclaimed albums with the complete cello works by Gabrielli and Scarlatti in 2018, and the complete cello works by Mendelssohn in 2019. She has played recitals at relevant festivals and venues in Estonia, Finland, Germany, Holland, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She has recorded for radio and television, and collaborated with professional orchestras and ensembles in Europe. She also has earlier professional experience as a studio teacher and curriculum developer at the music school level in Spain, having taught cello to children who are now professional musicians.
