Facundo M. Fernández

Facundo M. Fernández is a Regents’ Professor and the Vasser-Woolley Endowed Professor in Bioanalytical Chemistry in the School of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a faculty member of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering & Bioscience, Faculty Advisor of the IBB Systems Mass Spectrometry Core (SyMS-C), and Co-Director of the Georgia NIH MoTrPAC Chemical Measurement Site operated jointly with Emory University.

Born in Ramos Mejía, a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina, he attended Colegio Ward for elementary school and the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires for high school, and earned his M.S. (1996) and Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry (1999) from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. He carried out postdoctoral research at the University of Arizona with Vicki H. Wysocki and at Stanford University with Richard Zare before joining the Georgia Tech faculty in 2004. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2009 and to Professor in 2014, was named the Vasser-Woolley Endowed Professor in 2015, and was appointed a Regents’ Professor of the University System of Georgia in 2022.

The Fernández Lab develops measurement tools and workflows at the interface of analytical chemistry, instrumentation, and the life sciences. Core research directions include the fundamentals, applications, and instrumentation of ambient and atmospheric-pressure ionization; mass spectrometry imaging; ion mobility and multidimensional separations; and computational metabolomics. The group applies these tools to early detection of disease (with a long-standing focus on ovarian cancer), lipidomics, traumatic brain injury, the molecular effects of exercise through the NIH MoTrPAC consortium, microbial identification, the global- health problem of substandard and falsified medicines, and the chemical origins of life.

Teaching and mentorship have been central to Dr. Fernández's work since he joined Georgia Tech in 2004. Over more than two decades he has taught across the full chemistry curriculum, from large introductory and quantitative analysis sections to advanced graduate courses, reaching well over a thousand undergraduate and graduate students. He built several of these courses from the ground up, including graduate offerings in mass spectrometry, analytical chemistry, and special topics in metabolomics, bringing frontier measurement science directly into the classroom. His teaching has been recognized with the CETL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, selection as a Hesburgh Award Teaching Fellow, the College of Sciences Faculty Mentor Award, a place on the CIOS Honor Roll, repeated CETL "Thank a Teacher" recognitions, and inclusion among The Analytical Scientist Power List's Top 25 Mentors and Educators. He treats the classroom as an extension of the laboratory, teaching students not only how instruments work but how to ask quantitative questions and to weigh what a measurement can and cannot tell them. For him, rigorous and curious mentorship is inseparable from being a true scholar.

He served as Associate Editor (2019–2026) and interim Editor-in-Chief (2024–2025) of the Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, and as Associate Editor of Frontiers in Chemistry. His honors include the ACS Advances in Measurement Science Lectureship Award, the ANACHEM Award, the American Society for Mass Spectrometry Research Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the Beynon Prize, honorary membership of the Spanish Mass Spectrometry Society, and recognition on The Analytical Scientist Power List. He has mentored dozens of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and undergraduate researchers who have gone on to careers across academia, industry, and government.