Fernando was raised in José Mármol, a small town in the suburbs of the Autonomous City of Buenos
Aires, where he completed his primary and secondary education in public schools. He is the third of four
children in a family where discussions about education were frequent. His mother was a principal at a
local school, and his father was a staff in another school in the area. In 2002, Fernando graduated from
Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), a public and free research university in Buenos Aires, with a
Licentiate in Mathematics. As an undergraduate student, he was awarded the student fellowship "In Libris
Carpe Rosam, Marcelo G. Barroso Mastronardi" in Mathematics. This award, which had a profound
personal and academic impact on him, aims to support the harmonious development of scholars'
scientific and humanistic capacities. After a brief but unforgettable year as a lecturer at Universidad
Nacional de General Sarmiento (UNGS), he continued his studies at Universidad de Buenos Aires, where
he obtained his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 2010 under the supervision of Prof. Ricardo Durán. Fernando
was also awarded doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships by the National Scientific and Technical
Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina. All of Fernando's formal education in Argentina was in public
and free institutions. After finishing his Ph.D., Fernando was also a research affiliate at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology for six months and a visiting Assistant Professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute
and the University of California Riverside from 2011 to 2017. Since then, he has been a tenure-line
professor at Cal Poly Pomona's Department of Mathematics and Statistics. He is the father of two
daughters, who he raises with his wife in Pasadena, California.

Fernando's research interest focuses on certain functional inequalities in Sobolev spaces, such as the
Korn inequality and its related result on the solvability of the divergence equation, where the geometry of
the domain plays a crucial role. These inequalities are fundamental in the variational analysis of certain
partial differential equations (elasticity and Stokes equations) and the numerical analysis of their
solutions. He finds conducting research in Analysis as challenging and rewarding as teaching
Mathematics. During the last few years, he has collaborated with professors from Universidad Nacional
de General Sarmiento to coordinate global classroom experiences between students from this university
in Buenos Aires and his current institution in southern California. In these international multicultural
experiences, students meet online in a friendly academic environment to discuss mathematical problems
and share their ideas. These initiatives have worked as a great resource to empower both student groups
and help them strengthen their global perspective.

“Hispanic Heritage Month is an opportunity to celebrate and learn more about the diversity we have in our
Latinx community in Mathematics. Doing mathematics is a human activity that can be done in different
ways and languages, with different goals, by people with diverse backgrounds. Learning about others'
experiences enriches everybody and conveys the idea that mathematics is for anyone who enjoys
spending time in this challenging and creative activity in all its different forms.”

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