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 Director 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 Buenos Aires, Argentina, he earned his M.S. (1996) and Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry (1999) from the University of Buenos Aires. He carried out postdoctoral research at the University of Arizona with Vicki H. Wysocki and at Stanford University 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 invents measurement science 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.

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.