Elena Fernandez is full professor in Operations Research since 2007. She has spent much of her academic career at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona; since 2019 she is affiliated to the University of Cádiz.

Her research interest focuses on mathematical optimization models for discrete optimization, mainly on applications for transportation and logistics involving discrete location, network design and vehicle routing. She has supervised 12 doctoral thesis, and published over 80 scientific papers in the flagship OR journals, including Operations Research, Transportation Science, INFORMS Journal of Computing, EJOR, and Omega, with about 70 co-authors from a dozen of different countries.

Elena is an Associate Editor of Transportation Science and TOP, the OR Journal of the Spanish Society SEIO, and belongs to the Editorial Board of several other OR journals. She has been plenary speaker at several international conferences and in 2021 she received the Lifetime Achievement in Location Analysis Award 2021 of the Section on Locational Analysis (SOLA) of the Institute for Management Sciences and Operations Research (INFORMS).

Elena has served in several scientific organizations. In 2015-2016 she was President of the European Association of Operational Research Societies (EURO). Before (2011-2013) she was the Vice-President of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS) representing EURO, and the Operations Research Vice-President of the Spanish Statistics and Operations Research Society (SEIO) from 2007 to 2010.  Since January 2020 she is the Chair of the Scientific Committee of the Royal Spanish Mathematical Society (RSME).