José Fernández, born in Málaga in 1963, was graduated in Mathematics (1986), specialty of Astronomy and Geodesy, and obtained the PhD degree in 1992 from the Complutense University Madrid (UCM). He has been Professor of the UCM until 2002 when he became a staff researcher at AE Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC). From 1983 to 2011 he was a member of the Institute of Astronomy and Geodesy (IAG), currently being at the Institute of Geosciences (IGEO) CSIC and UCM. From 2008-2011 he was Acting Director of the Institute of Astronomy and Geodesy and one of those responsible for the creation of the Institute of Geosciences. He is Research Scientist at CSIC. His research is conducted within the framework of Geodesy and its application to natural hazards (earthquakes, volcanoes, instabilities field) and anthropogenic ones, both in terms of observation (using ground-based and space techniques) and modeling for the interpretation of observations.

He has participated in a total of 70 research projects (national, European, ESA, NASA and other Space Agencies and international organizations), being Coordinator, Principal Investigator or Co-investigator, in 42 of them. He has directed or co-directed, 3 PhD theses, one being special award doctoral degree. He has organized eight international conferences and has 257 presentations at conferences, mostly international ones, with 15 invited lectures in the past five years.

The results of his research have been described in over 200 publications, 93 of them in SCI journals. He has been editor of 6 books. His works have about 14500 citations, and a H factor of 22.

He is member of the Editorial Board of the journal «Pure and Applied Geophysics» (included in the SCI); Member of the Scientific Council of the «European Center for Geodynamics and Seismology» from the Council of Europe and the Government of Luxembourg; the Spanish Committee of Geodesy and Geophysics (CEGG) Section of Volcanology; and has served on various Working Groups of the International Association of Geodesy.

He has been visitor, among others, at the Royal Observatory of Belgium (Belgium); the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Department of Energy, USA), the University of Colorado Boulder (United States), the Geophysical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of Slovakia (Slovakia); National Cheng-Kung University (Taiwan); the University of California, Davis (USA); and the University of Western Ontario in London (Canada).