- Associate Professor, Statistics, UC Berkeley
- Co-director, Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science & Environment, UC Berkeley
- Faculty Scientist, Data Science and Technology Division, LBNL
Fernando Pérez is an Associate Professor of Statistics at UC Berkeley, a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the current Faculty Director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science at UC Berkeley (BIDS). His research focuses on the intersection of interactive computing, open science, and AI-based tools for science, with a particular focus on questions related to the earth's cryosphere, climate change and environmental sustainability. He also co-leads efforts to bring open source and AI into healthcare, in partnership with clinical and biomedical researchers. He created IPython while a graduate student in 2001 and co-founded its successor, Project Jupyter. At Berkeley, he also co-leads the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science & Environment (DSE), the Agile Metabolic Health Initiative, and computing at the Bakar Institute for Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP).
Fernando regularly lectures about scientific computing, data science and open science. He co-founded the International Interactive Computing Collaboration (2i2c) to provide open infrastructure for modern science and education, and is also a member of the Python Software Foundation, a founding member of NumFOCUS, and a National Academy of Science Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow. He is the recipient of the 2024 Exceptional Public Service Medal from NASA, the 2024 "Champions of Open Science" recognition from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the 2017 ACM Software Systems Award and the 2012 Award for the Advancement of Free Software from the Free Software Foundation. Fernando holds a PhD in particle physics from the University of Colorado at Boulder, which he followed with postdoctoral research in applied mathematics.
