Fernando Pérez is an associate professor in Statistics at UC Berkeley and a Faculty Scientist in the Department of Data Science and Technology at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. After completing a PhD in particle physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, his postdoctoral research in applied mathematics centered on the development of fast algorithms for the solution of partial differential equations. Today, his research focuses on creating tools for modern computational research and data science across domain disciplines, with an emphasis on high-level languages, interactive and literate computing, and reproducible research. He created IPython while a graduate student in 2001 and co-founded its successor, Project Jupyter. The Jupyter team collaborates openly to create the next generation of tools for human-driven computational exploration, data analysis, scientific insight and education.

He is a National Academy of Science Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow and a Senior Fellow and founding co-investigator of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. He is a co-founder of the NumFOCUS Foundation, and a member of the Python Software Foundation. He is a recipient of the 2012 FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software, and of the 2017 ACM Software System Award.