# Ariel Fernandez

Ariel Fernandez (born Ariel Fernández Stigliano, April 8, 1957) is an Argentinian–American physical chemist and pharmaceutical researcher.

## Education and early career

Fernandez received Licentiate degrees in Chemistry (1979) and Mathematics (1980) from the Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina. He then earned a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1984 with a thesis entitled Structural Stability of Chemical Systems at Critical Regimes

## Career

Fernandez held the Karl F. Hasselmann Professorship of Bioengineering at Rice University until 2011. He is a member of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina.
Fernandez developed the concept of the dehydron, an adhesive structural defect in a soluble protein that promotes its own dehydration. The nonconserved nature of protein dehydrons has implications for drug discovery, as dehydrons may be targeted by highly specific drugs/ligands. This technology was applied by Fernandez and collaborators to design a new compound based on the anticancer drug Gleevec, in order to reduce its cardiotoxicity. In laboratory tests, the new compound was similar to Gleevec in inhibiting gastrointestinal stromal tumors, but without toxic effects on cardiac cells, although it lacked Gleevec's inhibitory effects on leukemia cells.
The editorial board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences retracted a January 2006 paper coauthored by Fernandez because it had "substantial overlap", without attribution, of figures and text from an article by Fernandez published in Structure the previous month, a form of duplicate publication. The website Retraction Watch has documented incidences of scientific concerns about some of Fernandez's other publications, claims that Fernandez has denied.

## Awards

Fernandez was awarded a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award for early-career researchers in 1991; a Guggenheim Fellowship for researchers in Latin America and the Caribbean in 1995; and was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering for his "contributions to understanding protein folding and protein-protein interactions and the use of this knowledge to design new drugs", in 2006.

## Books

* Transformative Concepts for Drug Design: Target Wrapping, by Ariel Fernández (ISBN 978-3642117916, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010).
* Biomolecular Interfaces, by Ariel Fernández Stigliano (ISBN 978-3319168494, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2015).
* Physics at the Biomolecular Interface, by Ariel Fernández (ISBN 978-3319308517, Springer International Publishing AG, Switzerland, 2016).
* A Mathematical Approach to Protein Biophysics, by L. Ridgeway Scott and Ariel Fernández (ISBN 978-3319660318, Springer, 2017).
* Artificial Intelligence Platform for Molecular Targeted Therapy: A Translational Science Approach, by Ariel Fernández (ISBN 978-9811232305, World Scientific Publishing Co., 2021).
* Topological Dynamics in Metamodel Discovery with Artificial Intelligence: From Biomedical to Cosmological Technologies, by Ariel Fernández (ISBN 978-1032366326, Chapman & Hall/CRC Press, UK, 2022).
* Artificial Intelligence on Dark Matter and Dark Energy: Reverse Engineering of the Big Bang, by Ariel Fernández (ISBN 978-1032465548, Chapman & Hall/CRC Press, UK, 2023).