Dr Ignacio López-Goñi (Pamplona, ​​​​1962) is Professor of Microbiology at the University of Navarra, Spain, and Director of its Science Museum. Doctor in Biology, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute for Agricultural Research in Spain (INIA), the University of Berkeley (California, USA), and Columbia University (Missouri, USA).

Ignacio joined the University of Navarra in 1992, where he teaches Microbiology and Virology. His research focuses on the study of the molecular and genetic mechanisms that control the virulence of pathogenic bacteria, the development of new vaccines and new diagnostic methods for infectious diseases. He has participated as a Researcher in several national and European projects and has been the director of nine doctoral theses (one of them was awarded the 2010 SYVA Award for the best thesis in Animal Health). He was President of the International Society of Brucellosis, author of several specialized publications on molecular microbiology and genomics of Brucella bacteria. He is also President of the Microbiology Teaching and Dissemination group of the Spanish Society of Microbiology (SEM) and a member of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) and the Spanish Association for Scientific Communication (AEC2).

Ignacio combines his teaching and research work with an intense scientific communication activity through blogs, social media and massive online courses (MOOC). On Twitter, he created the online courses #microMOOC, #microMOOCSEM, and #EUROmicroMOOC. He collaborates with Naukas, a renowned science communication and dissemination platform, and with The Conversation — One of his articles, Ten good news about the coronavirus, is the most read article in the history of The Conversation in all its editions, being published by 77 media outlets around the world and with almost twenty-two million reads. He published several popular science books, including Do Vaccines Work? (Prismas Award 2018), Microbiota, the microbes in your body, Viruses and pandemics, and recently Prepared for the next pandemic: reflections from science. In 2016 he received the Tesla award for scientific communication, and in 2017 the ASEBIO award for Biotechnology Communication and Dissemination, in the Digital Press and New Media Category. In 2021 he received the Fundación Lilly-Apadrina la Ciencia Science Communication award, the COSCE Prize for Science Communication (awarded by the Confederation of Scientific Societies of Spain), and the CSIC-BBVA Foundation Prize for Scientific Communication, in the category of scientists (shared).