Build Your Spaced Repetition System: A Step-by-Step Guide to Double Your Learning Retention

Lopez Erica is a learning engineer and cognitive science researcher with over a decade of experience designing memory and retrieval systems for educational technology. She holds a master's degree in cognitive psychology from the University of California, San Diego, where her thesis examined the interaction between spacing schedules and retrieval difficulty in long-term memory retention.

Erica began her career as a curriculum designer for a medical education startup, building spaced repetition systems that helped thousands of residents prepare for board examinations. She later joined a language learning platform as a senior learning scientist, where she developed adaptive scheduling algorithms that reduced time-to-fluency by an average of forty percent across user studies involving over fifty thousand learners.

In addition to her work in educational technology, Erica has published research on retrieval practice in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition and the British Journal of Educational Technology. She has presented her findings at the annual conferences of the Cognitive Science Society and the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.

Erica currently consults independently for education companies, universities, and individual learners who want to apply evidence-based memory techniques to their specific learning contexts. She is a contributing writer for the Learning Scientists blog and the creator of the open-source SRS toolkit used by several independent language learning communities. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her partner and two cats, and she maintains a personal spaced repetition system of over twelve thousand cards covering topics from organic chemistry to classical guitar technique.