Topics in her research include facility location, network design, the vehicle routing problem, and heuristic methods for mathematical optimization.
She is a professor of statistics and operations research at the University of Cádiz.
[1] Her doctoral dissertation, Diseño y estudio computacional de algotimos híbridos para problemas de set partitioning, concerned optimization problems for set partitions and was supervised by Jaume Barceló.
She joined the department of computer science there in 1987, moved to the department of statistics and operations research as an associate professor (prof. titular) in 1989, and became a full professor (catedrática universidad) in 2007.
[1] Fernández was president of the Association of European Operational Research Societies (EURO) for the 2015–2016 term.