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. His research focuses on creating tools for computational research and data science across domain disciplines, with an emphasis on high-level languages, interactive and literate computing, and reproducible research. He is particularly interested in the intersection of physical models and machine learning in geoscience, to address critical problems such as climate change and environmental protection. He created IPython while a graduate student in 2001 and co-founded its successor, Project Jupyter. In 2021, IPython/Jupyter was named by Nature one of the "Ten computer codes that transformed science".

Pérez is a co-founder of the 2i2c.org initiative, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and the NumFOCUS Foundation. He is a National Academy of Science Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow and a member of the Python Software Foundation. He is a recipient of the 2017 ACM Software System Award and the 2012 FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software. He holds a PhD in physics from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and did postdoctoral research in applied mathematics at the same institution.